Hardwarethe secrets of Virtual benchmarketing

Marketing and benchmarking can lead to some pretty smart, but very misleading results. As promised, I shall give you a very good example of it. One promoted by some of the smartest people industry in fact. But first, a bit of background.   If you read our article about the nuts and bolds of virtualization, you might remember that...

Marketing and benchmarking can lead to some pretty smart, but very misleading results. As promised, I shall give you a very good example of it. One promoted by some of the smartest people industry in fact. But first, a bit of background.   If you read our article about the nuts and bolds of virtualization, you might remember that paravirtualization is one of the best ideas in the virtualization space. Basically, a paravirtualized guest OS is adapted so that it hands over control to the hypervisor whenever it is necessary. One of the big advantages is that the hypervisor has to intervene much less than hypervisors which do not use paravirtualized guest OSs. Xen, the flagship of paravirtualization, has a lot of other tricks to offer excellent performance, such as the fact that drivers in the guest OS are linked to real native linux drivers (in domain 0). The basic concept and technology behind Xen are - in theory - superior to other hypervisors which make use of emulation and/or binary translation. It is one of the weapons Xensource (and other Xen based virtualization solutions) can leverage against the undisputed king of virtualization land, VMWare. Xensource came up with a number of benchmarks which had to proof that Xen was by far superior performancewise. "Near Native Performance" became the new battlecry when the Xen benchmarketing team stormed the VMWare stronghold. Unfortunately, some of the benchmarks are nothing more than marketing, and have little... [ Read more on www.anandtech.com ]

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