VMware vs. bhyve Performance Comparison

https://b3n.org/vmware-vs-bhyve-performance-comparison/

by adamnemecek • 11 years ago

62 32 11 years ago

b3n.org

bechampion• 11 years ago

Very interesting.

blibble• 11 years ago

VMWare's EULAs prohibit publishing of benchmarks without approval, so this is interesting to see...

https://www.vmware.com/pdf/benchmarking_approval_process.pdf

Drakim3• 11 years ago

I have a hard time understanding the reasoning for this. What argument do they have as to why people shouldn't know about the performance?

KaiserPro2• 11 years ago

Because VMware is generally quite slow. However it is very easy to manage large estates of machines using the out of the box tools.

Unlike Xen or KVM

wila3• 11 years ago

The reasoning is that it is so easy to make mistakes in performance testing and then draw the wrong conclusion.

As somebody else mentions, this is testing NFSv3 in the VMware setup against local disk in bhyve. While still interesting, it certainly is not a 1 on 1 comparison.

edit: to expand a bit on that.

- the VMware storage appliance gets 24GB, the bhyve config isn't mentioned, but the host OS can access 32 GB.

- as he does mention his test load fits in the ARC, again interesting, but normally you would test real-world loads where your workload does not completely fit in the cache.

devonkim• 11 years ago

Very similar reasons for why you're not allowed to publish benchmarks for Oracle products as well. It's just plain bad PR at a point if someone does a terrible job. On the other hand, it also means that if you're an unscrupulous vendor, you can just squash benchmarks that do not make you look better than your competition. The lack of information available in general is what is frustrating for many folks though even if it's completely anecdotal evidence.

acdha• 11 years ago

As wila noted, benchmarks are easy to get wrong. It also helps to remember that VMware has been in the enterprise space for a long time and a lot of people in that field have been burned by benchmarketing where a competitor would run an ad campaign hoping nobody would notice that their big performance lead was due to misconfiguration[1].

Even now, where it's easier to check the details, it's fairly common to see things like the HTTP/2 demo from yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091689) which overstated gains by misconfiguring the HTTP/1.1 server used for comparison. That wasn't too bad because both were their own servers but if you imagine that they were comparing their shiny new server to e.g. Apache or IIS that way and you'd have the average late-90s web server sales pitch.

I don't like these terms but it's easy to understand why they became so common.

1. Stuff like different defaults for fsync, “accidentally” using different block sizes on a RAID array / filesystem / NFS mount, forgetting to use the same write-back/through settings on both, etc.

orf• 11 years ago

How is that enforceable?

cthalupa• 11 years ago

They can revoke your license to use the product. You break the EULA, you are no longer licensed to run vmware.

the-dude• 11 years ago

Just as almost all commercial DBMS vendors do.

wslh• 11 years ago

I published a few benchmarks in the past, a product manager and many senior technical people at VMware read it and nobody complained. I don't think they even know about this EULA.

KaiserPro2• 11 years ago

I would suggest that this is apples to oranges.

When you have VMware vcenter, the power is not in the inherent speed (its not the fastest) its the simplicity of creating a cluster.

If you have a network file store, its almost always going to be slower than local storage (assuming using the same hardware) thats not the point. Using a network file system/ block storage allows you to have HA disks. (or Load balancing, or much larger storage, or wider performance)

With pNFS you can have Active-Active with n servers (assuming you're using Netapp(yes they are still relevant), or GPFS)

As for vcenter, creating a HA cluster with ten hosts takes about 3 hours from scratch (assuming you install all ten servers at once.) Thats using the default tools, and the only thing that's scripted would be the install. (also using the vcenter appliance, not the shitty windows thing)

KVM whilst much faster is so very much harder to set up, monitor and operate. Yes you can use config management, but with vmware, you don't need it. (cough, ignoring machine profiles)

dchest• 11 years ago

the power is not in the inherent speed (its not the fastest)

You compared the speed yourself in the sentence immediately following "apples to oranges", so I assume it's actually "apples to apples", but your point is that VMware is better despite being slower.

rodgerd3• 11 years ago

KVM whilst much faster is so very much harder to set up, monitor and operate.

At the risk of repeating myself: oVirt would like a word with you.

Nux• 11 years ago

I'd like to also see Linux KVM vs ESXi vs Bhyve benchmarks, but excellent article! Good job pissing all over their EULA! :-)

Arguably where VMWare shines is management tools and so on, not exactly performance - this is kind of widely known, anecdotally at least and probably the number one reason they forbid benchmarks in the EULA. They know they're going to suck. :-)

Big corps with big money don't care that much about performance, they're more interested in ease of use, interoperability, SLAs, support, integration with other enterprise crap etc.

kjs3• 11 years ago

Big corps with big money don't care that much about performance

That's just not true. In fact, they often care more than small companies because of how expensive it is to get, say, 10% more performance out of a 4- or 5-Nines production environment.

travem• 11 years ago

Arguably where VMWare shines is management tools and so on, not exactly performance - this is kind of widely known, anecdotally at least and probably the number one reason they forbid benchmarks in the EULA.

Or maybe because people would publish "benchmarks" like this where they are comparing storage performance of a third party NFS solution (FreeNAS) running as a VMware VM and compare that to a solution using local disks and claim that is a useful comparison…

openforce• 11 years ago

At VMWare, I was working on ESX performance for a while, and I can say that performance is taken very seriously. Major features have been pushed back to the drawing board when the performance was not up to the mark. The handle on performance of ESX is tight.

Also, If I may say so, ESXi is one of the most well written pieces of system software to date.

nullrouted2• 11 years ago

As a former VMware employee I would agree with your sentiment, excellent hypervisor.

throwaway7767• 11 years ago

So, the benchmark shows that NFS is slower than direct disk access. Is anyone surprised?

The bit about VMware and bHyve is irrelevant here. If you wanted to compare the hypervisors performance, you would do it by using a local disk in VMware, or using NFS disks from bHyve. As it is, it looks like someone just really wanted an opportunity to advertise bHyve.

Disclaimer: I use bHyve myself, and I think it's pretty good for what it does.

geerlingguy2• 11 years ago

...but also much faster than normal/native shared folders: http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/vagrant-vmw...

NFS can be useful in many scenarios, but using native FS (or using rsync to sync instead of mount a shared folder) is always going to win that battle.

therealmarv• 11 years ago

Very interesting. Hope to see OS X xhyve to get more adoption from tools https://github.com/mist64/xhyve

geerlingguy2• 11 years ago

Ironic that I just posted VMware vs VirtualBox performance comparison earlier this morning: http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/vagrant-vmw...

nullrouted2• 11 years ago

That was a pretty good benchmark article, thanks!

VMware vs. bhyve Performance Comparison

Related Stories