Performance Testing Hypervisors with AL-Go
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Contents Why? What? Where? The Tests The Test VM Apache Cloudstack Hyper-V Bare-Metal XCP-ng Proxmox / KVM Results / Comparison Charts Conclusion Surprises Foreword I am fully aware, that as soon as you post something on the Internet, no matter what, someone will tell you and prove that you are wrong. I am always happy to get constructive feedback to improve things, though. But it is unlikely that I will run this series of tests again soon, because including writing this article and trying to figure out how Hugo works, that whole adventure took 3 days off my 1 week holiday ;-)

I spent a few days comparing various Hypervisors under the same workload and on the same hardware. This is a very specific workload and results might be different when testing oher workloads.

I wanted to share it here, because many of us run very modest Hardware and getting the most out of it is probably something others are interested in, too. I wanted to share it also because maybe someone finds a flaw in the configurations I ran, which might boost things up.

If you do not want to go to the post / read all of that, the very quick summary is, that XCP-ng was the quickest and KVM the slowest. There is also a summary at the bottom of the post with some graphs if that interests you. For everyone else who reads the whole post, I hope it gives some useful insights for your self-hosting endeavours.

  • node815@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    I discovered about a few months ago that XCP-NG does not support NFS shares which was a huge dealbreaker for me. Additionally, my notes from my last test indicated that I could not mount existing drives without erasing them. I’m aware that I could have spun up a TrueNAS or other file sharing server to bypass this, but maybe not if the system won’t mount the drives in the first place so it can pass them to the TrueNAS . I also had issues with their xen-orchestra which I will talk about below shortly. They also at the time, used an out of date CentOS build which unless I’m missing something, is no longer supported under that branding.

    For the one test I did which was for a KVM setup, was my Home Assistant installation, I have that running in Proxmox and ccomparativelyit did seem to run faster than my Proxmox instance does. But that may be attributed to Home Assistant being the sole KVM on the system and no other services running (Aside from XCP-NG’s).

    Their Xen-Orchestra for me was a bit frustrating to install as well, and being locked behind a 14 day trial for some of the services was a drawback for me. They are working on the front end gui to negate the need for this I believe, but the last time I tried to get things to work, it didn’t let me access it.

    • buedi@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I had a rough start with XCP-ng too. One issue I had was the NIC in my OptiPlex, which worked… but was super slow. So the initial installation of the XO VM (to manage XCP-ng) took over an hour. After using a USB NIC with another Realtek Chip, Networking was no issue anymore.

      For management, Xen-Orchestra can be self-built and it is quite easy and works mostly without any additional knowledge / work if you know the right tools. Tom Lawrence posted a Video I followed and building my own XO is now quite easy and quick (sorry for being a YT link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuS7tSOxcSo