[OmniOS-discuss] [smartos-discuss] kvm network performance survey

[Tobias Oetiker]

Hi John

Today John Barfield wrote:

> I can confirm that I?ve seen the same behaviors.
>
> I?ll try to pull some numbers but the truth is that debian based
> guest versions perform WAY better than CentOS guests.
>
> From all of my testing IMHO it is the host (illumos) virtio
> implementation.
>
> I only say this because I see such drastic performance results
> between different guest virtio driver version on illumos hosts
> that I do not see on Linux hosts.
>
> I can also confirm that I did not see this issue on SmartOS and I
> did test, Widows, Centos, And Ubuntu and was able to achieve near
> wire speed guest-2-guest on different SmartOS hosts.
>
> Here is my original thread posted about this in march:
> http://lists.omniti.com/pipermail/omnios-discuss/2015-March/004539.html

if you look at the spreadsheet you can see that the problem also
affects the e1000 driver ...  and since nothing has changed in kvm
between r10 and r12 (as dan pointed out in a earlier thread) my
guess is that the problem is due to some unfortunate interaction
between kvm and some other changes.

the spreadsheet now contains results from quite a number of
different configurations ...

   http://goo.gl/Vr1tC6

fact is, that we are in a pretty bad place with OmniOS now for our
production systems, as support for r10 is over and we can not
upgrade without totally killing performance ...

cheers
tobi

-- 
Tobi Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, Aarweg 15 CH-4600 Olten, Switzerland
www.oetiker.ch tobi at oetiker.ch +41 62 775 9902