QEmu vs VMWare benchmark
Some time ago I did a benchmark comparison of VMWare and QEmu (using
kqemu acceleration). I get asked about it so often, that I decided to post
it on the blog. My tests involve memory and CPU intensive operations like
compiling, so it might not be what you’re using your virtual machine
for, but I only use VMs to test my applications on various platforms.
Host System:
Slackware 10.2, vanilla 2.6.13 kernel
that comes with it
RAM: 512MB
CPU: AMD Turion64 MT30
It
is a 64bit CPU, but I only run 32bit OS.
Software:
QEmu 0.8.2
- using slack10.2 package from linuxpackages.net:
qemu-0.8.2-i486-1gds.tgz
KQEmu 1.3.0 pre9
- compiled from
source from kqemu-1.3.0pre9.tar.gz
VMWare Player 1.0.3 build-34682
-
installed from VMWare-player-1.0.3-34682.tar.gz
Since Slackware
doesn’t have SysVinit, before installing vmplayer I created
directory /opt/vmware
and
subdirectories rc0.d, rc1.d, rc2.d,
rc3.d, rc4.d, rc5.d, rc6.d.
When wmplayer installer
asked, I gave it /opt/vmware directory.
I aslo installed
vmware-tools. I extracted the .iso file from vmware-server
package,
and installed it inside guest system.
Guest
OS is Windows 2000 Pro.
Test1: QEmu
- Loaded kqemu module:
# modprobe kqemu # lsmod | grep kq kqemu 105604 0
- Created 4G image for guest system
$ qemu-img create -f qcow c.img 4G Formating ‘c.img’, fmt=qcow, size=4194304 kB
I’m not sure this was really needed, but it complained, so:
# echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq
Win2k is installed like this:
$ qemu -cdrom ../install/windows/win2000server/win2k.iso -hda c.img -m 256 -boot d -localtime
Test2: VMPlayer
With VMPlayer I created image with
qemu-img and created a small .vmx file:
# /opt/vmware/vmware start $ qemu-img create -f vmdk win2k.vmdk 4G $ vmplayer win2k.vmx
I had to disable sound and network while installing, otherwise it would get stuck at some point.
Running the installed system:
$ qemu -hda c.img -m 256 -localtime -kernel-kqemu
$ vmplayer win2.vmx
Benchmark
I did ./configure of wxWidgets 2.8.0rc1
On
each test I freshly unpacked the archive and ran:
$ time -p ./configure
I also rebooted the machine to make sure VMWare and QEmu don’t interfere with each other.
Host system:
51.44
QEmu (kqemu module loaded):
1962.29
QEmu with -kernel-kqemu:
1471.51
VMPlayer:
587.20
As you can see, GCC in virtual machine performs 10x slower than on real computer. I really like VM technology and it has good uses for testing and QA, but I really don’t understand people using it in production. Hardware is cheaper than ever and with VM you also have a single point of failure - if some hardware component fails, instead of losing one server, you lose all of them.