openvz at thinking sysadmin

Performance Isolation of a Misbehaving Virtual Machine with Xen, VMware and Solaris Containers – A paper comparing the ability of VMware (Workstation), Xen and Solaris Containers to isolate virtual machines from each other with regards to performance. Quick summary: VMware and Xen go one-two in protecting one virtual machine from another, and Solaris Zones lag far behind, a definite trade-off to consider if you’re inclined to use zones for their higher density. I would expect similar results to what was reported with Solaris if the authors had also looked at OpenVZ and FreeBSD Jails – in fact, (anecdotally) I’ve seen generally the same behavior with OpenVZ and Jails, although OpenVZ does give you a lot of knobs to adjust (if performance isolation is a concern for you with OpenVZ, you may want to look at all the options it gives you before making decisions about its suitability). It would have been nice to see more details about the Solaris configuration used in the paper, and to have had the work repeated with a recent OpenSolaris build – substantial work appears to be being done in this area (for example, Improved Resource Management and Zones Integration). Seen at blog.scottlowe.org.

thinking sysadmin