Ubuntu 12.04 KVM/Xen Virtualization: Intel vs. AMD

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Ubuntu 12.04 KVM/Xen Virtualization: Intel vs. AMD

With the upcoming availability of Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release that will be quickly making its way into many enterprise environments, here's a look at the virtualization performance of this popular Linux distribution. In particular, being looked at is the Linux virtualization performance of KVM, Xen, and Oracle VirtualBox compared to bare metal when using Intel Sandy Bridge Extreme and AMD Bulldozer hardware.

The last time comparing Xen, KVM, and VirtualBox performance was last October with Ubuntu 11.10, but since then there's been more upstream advancements in these popular virtualization platforms (separately, there's also KVM vs. VMware results and of VMware's wonderful virtual graphics driver. Xen as found in the Linux 3.0 kernel on Ubuntu 11.10 also had some critical performance issues, which have since been corrected in the Linux 3.2 kernel that is in use by Ubuntu 12.04. With testing the "out of the box" virtualization performance of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, an Intel Core i7 3960X "Sandy Bridge" Extreme Edition and AMD FX-8150"Bulldozer" systems were used.


The six-core with Hyper Threading i7-3960X was overclocked to 4.5GHz during testing and was running on the Intel DX79SI motherboard, The other system components remained the same between the Intel and AMD platforms: 16GB of memory (4 x 4GB of DDR3-1600MHz), a 240GBOCZ Vertex 3 Serial ATA 3.0 SSD, and an AMD Radeon HD 6570 graphics card. The AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer with its eight "cores" at 3.60GHz was running from the ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard while all of the other system components were maintained. Xen virtualization results were not available from the AMD Bulldozer platform since booting the Xen-enabled Linux kernel had problems with the ASUS motherboard. Unfortunately I don't have any latest-generation Intel/AMD server hardware at the moment, so this comparison was limited to using the high-end FX-8150 and i7-3960X processors.

When it came to running the virtualized tests, each VM test was run independently and the virtualized Ubuntu 12.04 instance was allowed to access all logical CPU cores and to 12GB of the system's 16GB of RAM. All of the virtualization packages were obtained from the Ubuntu Precise repository following the clean Ubuntu 12.04 daily installations from 24 March. The Ubuntu 12.04 settings for both the guest and host were at their default settings.
With the results in this article, all of the data was normalized against the bare metal results for each system to show how the virtualization performance compares in a relative, higher-is-better format. (Those wishing to look at the raw results or to manipulate the data in other means, all of the original results are obviously available via OpenBenchmarking.org.)



When starting with a few disk-focused tests, there is the initial create operation within CompileBench. KVM virtualization on the Intel Core i7 3960X was running at 89% the speed of bare metal for this disk test while the AMD FX-8150 KVM performance was at 87%. The VirtualBox performance for this single Dbench client run was well behind the Kernel-based Virtual Machine. Xen on the Sandy-E setup came in close to KVM.


When doing eight threads of 64MB random writes with the Threaded I/O Tester, KVM performed quite poorly. Oracle's VirtualBox was multiple times faster on both the Intel and AMD systems while Xen on the i7-3960X faired the best of the virtualization methods.


Switching over to the computationally-intensive tests, beginning with Google's libvpx VP8 encoding test, KVM on the Intel Sandy Bridge Extreme did better than the AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer (84% the speed of bare metal vs. 75%). However, VirtualBox on the Intel system did much worse than the same VirtualBox installation on AMD's latest-generation platform. Xen did remarkably well at 98% the speed of bare metal for the Intel system with 12 logical cores.


With the x264 video encoding test, KVM on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was running at 82% the speed of bare metal for Sandy-E and was at 86% on the Bulldozer setup. Xen continued to perform quite well on Intel while the Sandy Bridge Extreme performance with VirtualBox continued to do quite bad relative to how VirtualBox 4.1 was running on the AMD hardware.




The KVM-virtualized tests of the multi-threaded GraphicsMagick tests were quite interesting and did extremely well against the bare metal numbers. Strangely, for AMD's Bulldozer in these OpenMP tests some of the KVM results were faster than bare metal -- including when factoring in the standard deviation between the multiple runs. AMD's new architecture with KVM virtualization seemed to act strange in this OpenMP test and a few others. VirtualBox for GraphicsMagick was noticeably slower than KVM.


In the popular 7-Zip compression test, the relative KVM performance between the Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer processors was the same. However, VirtualBox on Sandy-E continued to be very sluggish while Xen still did quite good.



John The Ripper's Blowfish performance with KVM was close to bare metal and running at the same relative speed with Ubuntu 12.04 on the Intel and AMD processors.


MAFFT in a virtualized environment was running much slower, but was within a few percentage points between the latest-generation Intel and AMD processors.


Building out the Linux 3.1 kernel under KVM happened at 86% the speed of bare metal on the Intel Core i7 3960X configuration while with the AMD FX-8150 it happened at 93% the speed.


C-Ray on the Core i7 3960X was at 95% the native speed for Xen and KVM virtualization methods from the Precise Pangolin while with the FX-8150 with KVM it was at 99% the speed.






The Parallel BZIP2 compression results were close as well as for the Crafty, Nero2D, and Smallpt results.







The very computationally demanding NAS Parallel Benchmarks from NASA generally favored KVM virtualization with AMD over Intel KVM.

While there are many results to go through, a few items stuck out:
- VirtualBox 4.1 on Ubuntu 12.04 when running on the Intel Core i7 3960X "Sandy Bridge Extreme" performed very poorly. VirtualBox was most often running at a small fraction of the speed of the KVM and Xen virtualization methods for the i7-3960X. VirtualBox on the AMD FX-8150 performed much closer to where KVM was running, but still was noticeably behind the popular Kernel-based Virtual Machine. There is some major issue going on with the $1000 USD Intel processor and VirtualBox, possibly similar to the Xen performance issues encountered last year. VirtualBox seemed to do the worst on Intel with multi-threaded workloads.
- Xen 4.1 generally performed in line with KVM's performance on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x86_64 with the Linux 3.2 kernel. This is at least for the Sandy-E system, but Xen issues with the ASUS motherboard prevented Bulldozer Xen results from making it out there.
- Between Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer for KVM virtualization, the relative performance was generally quite close between these competing latest-generation architectures. If looking at the harmonic mean of the over three dozen tests that were run, the Intel Core i7 3960X was running at 93% the speed of bare metal with KVM while the AMD FX-8150 came in at 90% the speed of the bare metal Bulldozer. Alternatively, with the geometric mean of all the results, the i7-3960X was at 85% the speed of bare metal while the AMD FX-8150 was at 88%. VirtualBox on the FX-8150 was at 85% while the problematic VirtualBox-on-Sandy-E was at 59%. Xen on Sandy-E came in at 94%.
Original Site：http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1204_virt&num=1
Related Topics：
1、Ubuntu 11.10: Xen vs. KVM vs. VirtualBox
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1110_xenkvm&num=1
2、Linux KVM vs. HandelSpielVM Virtualization
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=kvm_handelspiel&num=1
3、VMware's Virtual GPU Driver Is Running Fast
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=vmware_vmwgfx_g3d&num=1
4、OPEN BENCHMARKING
http://openbenchmarking.org/