Not happy enough comparing ESX Server 3.0.1 with Xen 3.0.3 and with XenEnterprise 3.2 (on multiple NICs scenario), VMware is now presenting a third analysis, still against XenEnterprise 3.2, but this time on multiple virtual machines scenario:
In a companion paper we looked at loading up a single virtual machine (VM) with multiple netperf instances, each running over its own NIC (Network Interface Controller). This effectively exposes the real virtualization overhead of high-throughput networking. While there are some real-world use cases that require this much network bandwidth in a single VM, a much more common scenario is spreading this bandwidth over many VMs running on one physical machine. This is a natural result of consolidating servers. For this paper we used the same hardware and software as in the multi-NIC paper, but performed a “scale-out” test: each of several VMs had a 1 Gbps physical NIC dedicated to it and each communicated to a similar dedicated NIC on the client machine through a netperf/netserver pair. The VMs did not share NICs. We hope this will lead to a better understanding of the performance issues involved with virtualizing networking…
Read the whole paper at source.