Luke Schwab wrote:
Hi,
I have recently been running performance tests with zones on several Sun
servers. (280's and 880's), 2 CPU and 8CPUs respectively.
On my 280 servers (2CPU machines), I installed and booted 3 zones and I get
poor performance on across the network (400Mbps). I only transfer data at 80%
of what I can in the global zone with no zones installed or booted (where I
measured 550Mbps). That is a 20% difference in performance. I tested with the
opensource tool called IPERF.
I originally thought that zones were causing my problems so I decided to move to
another type of hardware, a V880 (8 CPU) machine. When I ran my performance tests
again with 3 zones installed and booted I saw <1% overhead in the network
compared to running in the global zone with no zones installed or booted. Both of
the 880 tests ran around 860 Mbps throughput with less then 1% difference between
several scripted tests.
Can anyone explain why I see this? Both servers have gigabit NICs installed.
The only thing I can think of is that the backplane on the servers in a
bottleneck for the small 280 servers. But how could this (or something else in
the kernel space) be causing the symptoms I see above?
Any comments would be helpfull,
Basically, running a Zone networking takes CPU. If you have the CPU
resources to spare, then it won't matter much. But if you are CPU
limited, then the impact of a Zone will be more noticeable.
One way to get better performance in your zone, I think, may be to use
exclusive IP instances. This requires each zone have its own NIC, but
the benefit is that less CPU is required to forward packets to the
"correct" zone. A compromise (halfway) may be to use VLANs, and put
each zone in its own VLAN, and still use exclusive IP instances.
-- Garrett
Thanks,
ljs
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