Benchmarking

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drescherjm

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What are good tools to benchmark guest disk, memory and video performance? I am trying to determine what is the best performing virtulization that I can run a 64 bit XP guest with 3GB ram and 4 cores and 400GB disk allocated to the guest under 64 bit gentoo linux on a 3GHz i7 system. I have tested kvm, virtualbox and vmware for months.
 
I am worried about accurate measurement since timing isn't always accurate in a virtualized environment.
 
Thanks.

After running a few disk benchmarks I think I need to do some sort of benchmark with the target application and see if it makes a big difference between kvm and virtualbox and possibly vmware. The biggest problem is making the test fair. I'll work on that.
 
And the answer.

In a ~1 hour compile test of VTK-5.6.1 (+examples - testing) with 4 cores of a 3.1GHz i7 allocated to guest on the same disk and 2 partitions (1 for os 1 for data) restored from an images between each test. Both partitions were also raw partitions so they did not sit on top of any filesystem. The built times for kvm and virtual box were closer than I would have thought.


KVM (virtio disk + writeback cache): 53 minutes
Virtualbox ( sata + writeback cache): 58 minutes

And yes I did reboot the host and guest before each test.

Maybe next time I will compare this to the native system performance with and without HT on so I can do a 4 core test.
 
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I added vmware-player-3.1.3.324285 to the same test and recalculated the time differences with seconds this time.

vmware-player-3.1.3.324285 (ide -os , LSI SCSI Data - both with write cache) : 52 min 52 sec
kvm : 52 min 59 sec
vb: 57 min 58 sec

So it looks I am going to try vmware-player for a while since the video performance is much better with vmware versus kvm.
 
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