PerformanceTest is a fast, easy to use software benchmarking tool which allows everybody to quickly assess the performance of their PC and compare it to a number of standard 'baseline' computer systems. But what if we are going to use PassMark’s PerformanceTest in a virtual machine and try to find out if it is performing at its best. This way it’s easy to compare the performance of one virtual machine to other virtual machines hosted on the same or a different ESX server. You can use it to identify and measure the effect of virtual hardware configuration changes and upgrades.
I’ve installed the PerformanceTest in two Windows 2003 (32) virtual machines located on the different ESX4 hosts, besides some basic memory and CPU testing I was really interested in the performance difference between the E1000 and the VMXNET Generation 3 virtual network adapter.
The virtual machines are both connected to a virtual distributed switch configured with a community PVLAN, the servers are using dedicated physical Intel Pro PT-1000 adapters and are connected to a Cisco 2960 Catalyst switch. After running the test for 200 seconds you can see a performance benefit of 10% when using the VMXNET3 virtual adaptor compared to the E1000.
When both virtual machines are hosted on the same ESX server and only using the “left side” of the distributed virtual switch the network performance is 300% faster. I know these network graphs show details of the TCP/IP network transfer speed (in kilobits / sec) over short period of time and are not really representative, the average network speed may be limited by the LAN card, the CPU or network infrastructure such as firewalls and switches. But I’ve learned two lessons, the VMXNET3 is faster and local ESX traffic outperforms external traffic by 300%.
Nice test! Have you tested with Windows 2008 performance? We see @ vmguru.nl that Windows 2008 copy performance from within the OS is crap. On virtual and physical platforms.
For the best performance, use the VMXNET3 paravirtualized network adapter for operating systems in which it is supported. This requires that the virtual machine use virtual hardware version 7, and that VMware Tools be installed in the guest operating system.
VMXNET3 does have the following features extra on top of the e1000 > IPv6 TSO, Jumbo Frames, RSS, MSI-X but it only works with virtual hardware version 7, so if you have a mixed environment with esx3.5 and esx 4 you have to use the e1000 if the machines move between.
>We see @ vmguru.nl that Windows 2008 copy
>performance from within the OS is crap. On
>virtual and physical platforms.
Well SMB/CIFS protocol is not fast at all, based on 64KB chunks, it has severe penalties with nowadays very fast NICs (Gb and 10GbE).
SMBv2 is supposed to fix tha problem with 1MB chunks. But this is only available with Windows 2008, Vista and W7. Have you tested it?
Rgds,
Didier