You want Hyper-V to outperform ESX?
Posted Tuesday, February 08, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
Deepstorage.net, a third party dedicated to providing objective analysis, testing, and reviews posted a Network Computing blog recently that discussed the performance difference (in terms of IOPS) they had seen when testing Hyper-V and VMware ESX against the same backend storage configuration (a SnapSAN 2000 from Overland Storage). Overland had hired Deepstorage.net to run the tests, but that wasn’t what the blog was about. In his blog, Howard Marks commented on the fact that in these identical tests ESX seemed to consistently outperform Hyper-V, leading him to conclude that ESX had a cleaner I/O path than Hyper-V. Deepstorage.net’s multiple workload benchmark showed Hyper-V pushing 733 aggregate IOPS vs ESX’s 955 IOPS, indicating roughly 25% better performance with ESX.
At first I was surprised that the original post and the testing report available on the Overland site did not indicate one of the most important consideration: what kind of storage configuration was used. In an apparent response to my comment Howard Marks clarifed that he was using thinly provisioned VMDKs on the ESX side and dynamic VHDs on the Hyper-V side - so the testing was done in a somewhat comparable scenarios. However I was surprised to find out that in both case the thinly provisioned virtual disks were fully expanded prior to the actual benchmark run. In my opinion it defeats the main purpose of configuring the thinly provisioned objects and confuses unintitated readers.
But that’s not even the real point of this. The point is, native storage options in hypervisors today are pretty pathetic, regardless of whether that’s Hyper-V or ESX. It’s because the storage layer in use - be that VMFS or NTFS - was never designed for the virtual world. The very random, write-intensive I/O patterns so common in virtual server environments pretty much kill physical disk performance. And the hardware vendors are the ones benefiting from that – it means they can sell you a lot more spindles. If you like that, great. If you don’t, you might want to know about what we’re doing.
We’ve got a true virtualization storage software solutuion that is designed specifically for the types of I/O patterns you see in virtual environments. You want Hyper-V to outperform ESX? Based on what we’re seeing at customer sites and in our own internal testing, we’ll have Hyper-V routinely outperforming ESX while we use a lot fewer disk spindles and less storage capacity. Our storage objects (we call them virtual VHDs) look like VHDs to Hyper-V, but they outperform fixed disks by 3-4x and use on average 30% fewer disk spindles. This all assumes the same storage back end for the comparisons (Virsto vs native Hyper-V) in tests we’ve run. This definitely beats the puny 25% perfromance difference reported by Deepstorage.
Sound interesting? Download our software today and check it out. And welcome to the world of 21st century storage…!
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