On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 8:30 PM, Henrik Johansson wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I read this blog posting, the author switched from VMWare to BSD Jails and
> saw drastic performance increment. We known for long that Solaris zones
> which are similar to Jails have very little overhead to other solutions, but
> the trend seems to be towards VMWare as a magic fits-all solution for all
> X86 virtualization. Has anyone similar experiences to share with zones?
There does seem to be a belief in the industry as a whole that virtualization
and vmware (or xen or whatever, depending on who your supplier is) are
synonymous. Which is unfortunate and misleading.
If you've got a heterogeneous mix of server OS platforms to consolidate,
or if features like live migration are of interest, then something like vmware
is a clear winner. On the other hand, zones (especially really
lightweight sparse
root zones) win easily if you've got a lot of identical systems to provision and
the extra features aren't important. In the middle, I'm not convinced that lx
branded zones are worth it given the advance in other virtualization solutions.
> I've always advocated zones if the workloads fits the separation it provides,
> and pointed out that VMWare are probably not the best solution for I/O
> intensive loads. But I have myself not used any hypervisor based solution
> for systems with heavy workloads.
I use zones extensively in I/O intensive workloads. We zone everything on our
Solaris machines by default. (Unless it's offering services like nfs
that can't be
zoned - or we have some other good reason not to use zones, but the starting
position is that we use a zone, rather than considering zones the special case.)
One slight snag that I see occasionally now is that because it's so
easy to load a
system up with zones, it's relatively easy to build up a workload that
overwhelms
the host system for I/O and networking. You can consolidate more zones than
heavyweight virtual machines on a given box, and the I/O is more efficient, so
you can drive the system in different ways. You just need to keep
sizing in mind.
--
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
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