Hyper-V and VHD Performance - Dynamic vs. Fixed

winsrvperf — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:08:00 GMT

My name is Tim Litton, I work as a Program Manager within the Microsoft Windows Server team, and my particular area of focus is performance optimization for Hyper-V.

With the recent release of Hyper-V, customers are starting to ask us how to configure Hyper-V to get the best performance. It’s generally recognized that there is overheard running a virtualized environment, but the question that really needs to be answered is how much?

With this in mind, I thought I’d share some of our recent testing of Hyper-V and how disk workloads perform when using Fixed or Dynamic VHDs. The goal here is to provide some data that backs up the tuning guidance that can be here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Perf_tun_srv.mspx.

The following graph shows the relative performances for a number of different scenarios (with Dynamic VHD being the baseline).

Fixed VHD always performs better than a Dynamic VHD in most scenarios by roughly 10% to 15% with the exception of 4k writes, where Fixed VHD performs significantly better.

We ran 16 virtual machines when performing these tests (see “How We Tested” below) with the goal of evaluating how well Hyper-V performed in the server consolidation scenario. Being able to consolidate a number of physical machines onto a single machine and have the virtual machines able to handle the load is a very important design goal for Hyper-V.

The exact result that a customer is going to see will depend on quite a few variables (e.g. how large and often the reads and writes are, how many outstanding I/O there can be at one time), so performing real-world testing is the best way to assess what impact virtualization will have.

Recently, QLogic published a benchmark for I/O throughput for storage devices going through Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (http://www.qlogic.com/promos/products/hyper-v.aspx) that closely matches the native performance, thus demonstrating Hyper-V’s ability to bring the advantages of virtualization to large-scale datacenters.

How We Tested

Hardware: DP DL580 G5, 16 x 2.4 GHz (Intel E7340), 16 GB RAM

Disk: HP P800, 25 spindles

Virtual Machine Setup: 16 Virtual machines, each running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition (64 bit), 1 CPU, 796 MB RAM

Testing Software: We used IO Meter (http://www.iometer.org) to generate the workload for the I/O system, with a maximum number of 8 outstanding I/Os per virtual machine to a 100MB file.

Hyper-V and Multiprocessor VMs

winsrvperf — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 04:43:00 GMT

Thanks for visiting our blog! I’m a development lead in the Windows Server Performance team and I led the performance effort on Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 over the past three and a half years.

We’ve worked with the product team throughout the Hyper-V development cycle to deliver a competitive product and we’re excited about shipping Hyper-V RTM this year, with the Hyper-V Beta shipping in Windows Server 2008 this week!

Architectural Overview

Hyper-V uses a hypervisor-based architecture and leverages the driver model of Windows for broad hardware support. The hypervisor partitions a server into containers of CPU and memory. As a micro-kernel, it provides mechanisms for inter-partition communication upon which our new high-performance synthetic I/O architecture is built. The root partition owns physical I/O devices and provides services including I/O implemented by the virtualization stack to the child partitions.

The virtualization stack implements emulated I/O devices such as an IDE controller and a DEC 21140A network adapter. However, it is expensive to virtualize such devices. Sending a single I/O might require multiple trips between the virtualization stack and child partition. Instead, Hyper-V exposes synthetic I/O devices that are specially designed for VM environments. These devices are attached to VMBus, which is a plug-and-play capable bus that uses shared memory for efficient inter-partition communication. The Windows guests detect the devices on VMBus and loads the appropriate drivers.

Synthetic I/O in Hyper-V uses a client-server architecture with Virtualization Service Providers (VSPs) in the root and Virtualization Service Clients (VSCs) in the child. This architecture significantly reduces the cost of sending an I/O. Virtual Server customers should observe a major reduction in CPU usage in I/O-intensive loads when they migrate their VMs to Hyper-V.

In addition, we developed operating system enlightenments for Windows Server 2008, which make the NT kernel and memory manager smarter in VM environments, again to reduce the cost of virtualization.

Multi-Processor Guests

For this first blog post, I want to highlight one of the major performance features in Hyper-V: multi-processor virtual machines. Hyper-V supports 4P VMs for Windows Server 2008 guests and 2P VMs for Windows Server 2003 SP2 guests. For more intensive server workloads, you might consider virtualizing them in 2P or 4P VMs on Hyper-V. Of course, you should use multi-processor VMs only if the workload requires it since there is some cost to having additional processors.

However, operating system kernels and drivers use spin locks which do not block and spin until the lock is acquired, with the assumption that the lock is held for a short period. Virtualization breaks this assumption as virtual processors (VPs) are time-sliced. If a VP is preempted while holding a spin lock, other VPs may spin for a long time wasting CPU cycles.

We developed innovations in the hypervisor and Windows Server 2008 kernel to try to prevent long spin wait conditions and also to efficiently detect and handle them when they do occur. We also designed the hypervisor, including the scheduler and memory virtualization logic, to be lock-free on most critical paths to ensure good scalability on multi-processor systems.

As a result, Windows Server 2008 as a 4P guest scales well compared to the physical 4P system. This is one example of Windows Server 2008 as a guest and Hyper-V together providing performance advantages. We plan to continue to improving our scalability on multi-processor systems and multi-processor VMs in subsequent releases.

Closing Thoughts

Thanks for reading this far! I would encourage you to try Hyper-V Beta in Windows Server 2008, which launched this week. And take a look at the Windows Server 2008 and Virtualization web site for more information.

I look forward to writing more on our work on Hyper-V performance. Please add our blog to your RSS feeds!

Regards,

John Sheu

Senior Development Lead

Windows Server Performance Team

Windows Server Performance Team Blog : Virtualization Hyper-V Performance

Hyper-V and VHD Performance - Dynamic vs. Fixed

Hyper-V and Multiprocessor VMs