Re: [Xen-users] Poor Windows 2003 + GPLPV performance compared to VMWare

[Dion Kant <dion@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Adam,

Can you give it a retry with the Windows DomU running from a file container?

mount another LV somewhere on dom0 (e.g. /var/lib/xen/images/windows)
Use "qemu-img convert your.vmdk -O raw
/var/lib/xen/images/windows/disk0.raw" to create the file container

I see significant disk I/O performance improvement on all my Windows
DomU's when running them from file containers as compared to running
them directly from a block device.

Cheers,
Dion

On 09/13/2012 02:25 PM, Adam Goryachev wrote:
> I have an application server running on MS Windows 2003, which was a
> clean install on VMWare last year (after a failed migration attempt to
> XenServer).
>
> At this point, a benchmark (actually a live process run regularly on the
> machine) produced a result of 7800 to 7900 transactions per second
>
> I've recently migrated this to Xen by:
> 1) Uninstall VMWare tools
> 2) Shutdown Windows
> 3) Use VMWare to download the vmdk
> 4) Write the VMDK file (dd) to the same LVM that contained the VMWare
> storage area (which was exported by iSCSI to VMWare
> 5) Installed Debian Testing with Xen 4.1
> 6) Using the exactl same iSCSI server/LVM config etc, started the VM
> 7) Installed the GPLPV drivers
>
> Everything seemed to work, and all was good.
>
> Then, the user ran the above process, and got consistently, results of
> approx 2500 transactions per second
>
> I increased the vcpus from 2 to 4, but this didn't change the result at all.
>
> I modifed the domU config for the disk line from hda to xvda, and the
> result increased slightly to 2560 / sec (these tests are just one off
> tests, no verification of actual performance increase etc...).
>
> In any case, I seem to have a significant loss of performance on the
> domU when compared to VMWare.
>
> The storage server/network is identical
> The dom0 machine is identical to the VMWare machine
>
> Here is my current domU config file:
>
> kernel        = "/usr/lib/xen-4.1/boot/hvmloader"
> builder        = 'hvm'
> memory        = 4096
> shadow_memory    = 12
> device_model    = '/usr/lib/xen-default/bin/qemu-dm'
> localtime    = 1
> name        = "vm1"
> cpus        = "2,3,4,5"    # Which physical CPU's to allow
> vcpus        = 4        # How many Virtual CPU's to present
> viridian    = 1
> disk = [
> 'phy:/dev/disk/by-path/ip-10.30.10.23:3260-iscsi-iqn.2012-06.domain:vm1-lun-0,xvda,w'
> ]
> vif        = ['bridge=xenbr0, mac=00:16:3e:39:10:1a']
> boot        = 'c'
> sdl        = 0
> vnc        = 1
> vncdisplay    = 10
> vncviewer    = 0
> vncconsole    = 0
> vncunused    = 0
> stdvga        = 1
> usb        = 1
> usbdevice    = 'tablet'
> acpi        = 1
> apic        = 1
> on_reboot    = 'restart'
> on_poweroff    = 'destroy'
> on_crash    = 'restart'
> audio        = 0
>
> Any suggestions on how to improve performance would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you,
> Adam
>


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