[libvirt-users] network-performance

[Brian K. White]

On 2/1/2011 12:39 PM, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> I'm just starting to take a look at guest networking performance and am
> a little disappointed. I'm comparing two setups:
>
> Host: Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V
> Guest: CentOS 5.5 x86_64
>
> Host: CentOS 5.5 x86_64 kvm running libvirt
> Guest: CentOS 5.5 x86_64
>
> The guests are essentially identical except that I'm running the
> Microsoft Linux Integration Components synthetic drivers on the windows
> hosted VM. The libvirt setup uses bridged networking. Running bonnie++
> on a nfs mounted filesystem on each guest I'm seeing the libvirt hosted
> guest get between 16%-35% of the performance of the Hyper-V guest. Is
> this expected? Is there anything I can do to increase network
> performance of the kvm guest?
>

First thing is to stop unfairly comparing things that don't even claim 
to do the same job. hyper-v is a hypervisor, while kvm is not, xen is.

It would be closer but still unfair, to compare qemu or virtualbox for 
windows to kvm.

You didn't say what kind of networking is being used wth hyper-v, but 
it's an understood fact that bridgeing in linux is easy to use and less 
efficient than routing or vlan or macvlan.

So I guess the answer is use xen and something other than bridging.

-- 
bkw