Outperforming VMware: Virsto and Hyper-V
Posted Monday, March 07, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
I recently blogged about how Virsto and Hyper-V combined give you a virtualization platform that is data center ready and compares very favorably on key metrics like performance, storage capacity utilization, and snapshotting to VMware. Let’s take a little closer look at the performance comparison.
We’ve run tests internally comparing Virsto vDisks (which is our version of a VHD) against native Microsoft fixed disks, against native Microsoft dynamic disks, and against VMware thick and thin VMDKs. We offer slightly more performance (it varies between 15% and 30%) than fixed disks and thick VMDKs but give you all the advantages of thin provisioning, high performance snapshots and instant provisioning. We offer 3x – 4x the performance of dynamic disks, and roughly the same against VMware thin VMDKs, again with all the advantages of thin provisioning, high performance snapshots and instant provisioning. And the performance differential gets even greater with Virsto if you plan to use snapshots. In both the native Hyper-V and VMware environments, performance degrades as more snapshots are created and retained. Not true with Virsto, so the performance advantage improves even further. Clearly, Hyper-V with Virsto can significantly outperform native VMware, assuming the same hardware configuration, in situations where you want high performance, thin provisioning, and snapshots at the same time.
One other comment I’ll make. Both Hyper-V and VMware support shared ownership of virtual hard disks at the VM rather than at the LUN level. Hyper-V uses cluster shared volumes (CSVs), while this feature is native to VMFS. This feature is important to provide for granular failover of VMs, something that has value not only for HA but also for workload balancing. Virsto vDisks support this same capability – shared ownership at the VM level. We’ve seen some performance impacts with CSV use that I’ll blog on in a later post, but I want to underline that vDisks support this capability without any of the performance issues we’ve seen with CSVs.
If you want high performance, both against your data and for your snapshots and clones, and thin provisioning together, there is no doubt that Hyper-V with Virsto installed gives it. And that combination handily outperforms VMware.
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