[OmniOS-discuss] Potential KVM Virtio Performance Issues

[Phil Harman]

John,

Interesting work and data. Thanks for sharing.

I've also been playing with Oracle Solaris 11.2 vs Linux vs FreeBSD on SmartOS vs ESX5.5 (free edition) both VM2VM and VM to remote host over a couple of Intel 10GBASE-T cards.

As far as I can tell, there remains no virtio-net driver for Solaris / Illumos guests, so I've been using e1000g, which really sucks.

I found virtio-net works ok under KVM, but was blown away by vmxnet3 under ESX performance (for which a Solaris / Illumos drivers do exist), being able to get close to 8gbps from the guest over the wire!

To achieve this I had to use jumbo frames (something the current Solaris 11.2 e1000g appears unable to do at all any more).

So I was wondering, while you are there, whether you've got (or can get) any data for KVM virtio-net VM2VM using jumbo frames?

My expectation would be at least 2x for MTU 9000 vs 1500.

I also wonder whether like for like comparison with ESX might encourage further improvements?

As someone used to say at Sun "If Linux is faster, it's a Solaris bug!". It would be great if the community could agree to the same for ESX vs KVM :)

Cheers,
Phil


> On 24 Mar 2015, at 23:45, John Barfield <john.barfield at bissinc.com> wrote:
> 
> Btw I did go ahead and test both virtio methods...I gave a vm the -device argument on one interface and the -net argument for another the results where....
> 
> -device = eth0 = 952mbps
> -net = eth1 = 199 mbps
> 
> Thanks and have a great day,
> 
> John Barfield
> 
>> On Mar 24, 2015, at 6:12 PM, Dan McDonald <danmcd at omniti.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Mar 24, 2015, at 7:04 PM, Dominik Hassler <hasslerd at gmx.li> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Dan,
>>> 
>>>>> After further testing I achieved 952 MBytes on a VM-2-VM
>>>>> connection...1
>>>>> linux Ubuntu 12.04 vm to another CentOS 6.6 VM running on two
>>>>> different SmartOS host machines (through an extreme networks switch).
>>> 
>>> if I got John correctly, he was running his second test on SmartOS hosts...
>>> 
>>> We did a lot of testing on OmniOS with -net vnic and -device
>>> virtio-net-pci but sadly to no avail...
>>> 
>>> I think we have to hope that SmartOS kvm improvements will get
>>> upstreamed sooner or later.
>> 
>> Ahh yes.
>> 
>> I was hoping to have them ready for 014, but it's a complicated process to upstream larger projects, and Joyent was in the middle of getting their new Triton release out the door.
>> 
>> Dan
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