Xen Performance

[Andrew MacLachlan]

On Tue, October 21, 2008 11:56 am, Koopmann, Jan-Peter wrote:

> That is hard if not impossible to answer I am afraid. We are using
> MailScanner and BarricadeMX on Virtual Iron (Xen based) on several sites
> with great success. However none of them is high volume (ISP style). All
> performance comparison I have seen and the few I have done myself
> suggest (!) that a proper Xen implementation can (!) outperform ESX in
> nearly all ways but certainly not to a big extent.
>
> The problem is that to my knowledge VMWare simply does not allow proper
> comparison of their platform to others and will smash down all reports
> on it in public. I might be wrong though.
>
> I think performance in your case will not be so much depending on using
> ESX vs. a good Xen installation (with suitable drivers etc.). It is more
> a question of "can/should I virtualize this" in the first place. This
> again depends on your I/O requirements, what SAN/NAS you have available
> etc., how much RAM, what CPUs etc. If you can virtualize it with ESX I
> do not see why you would have a performance problem with Xen.
>
Thanks JP - I agree with your comments regarding "Should I virtualize" -
I've been working with x86 virtualization since last century (that always
sounds impressive) when the first versions of VMware Workstation were
released, and I have to keep telling people that virtualization is a great
technology, it doesn't suit every workload (put another way: Just because
you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD). My request was more around comparing ESX
v Xen performance. I am aware of VMware viciously slapping down any
comparisons (A clause in their EULA states that you can't benchmark or
compare).
The reason I'm asking all this is because I've just released a test
version of ESVA (which was never intended to be carrier-grade) for Xen
(previously ESVA was only available for VMware platforms) so I was
interested in other peoples' experiences where they had tried MailScanner
on both platforms.

-Andy