Testing the Performance of ESXi in VMware Player written 5 years ago

What happens to performance when you run VMWare ESXi inside VMWare Player?

Windmills of Your Mind

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning wheel
As the images unwind
Like the circle that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Setup - Hardware

• Core i5
• 16GB Ram
• 256GB SSD
• Windows 7

Setup - Tests

1. To test disk and CPU Performance, video encoding is a pretty good benchmarking tool. To test each platform we would transcode the Big Buck Bunny 1080p Trailer from Quicktime .mov format into the Apple TV2 Preset within Handbrake and note the Average Frame Rate.

2. To test synthetic (single threaded) CPU Performance, we run SuperPi and take the time taken to calculate PI to 2 Million places.

3. To test synthetic Disk performance, we run Crystal DiskMark and note down the Read/Write speeds.

Environments

Reference Environment	64bit	4 cores	16GB	Bare metal. CPU has 4 cores
One Layer of Virtualisation	32bit	4 cores	4GB	Windows 7 running inside VMWare Player on Windows 7. (32bit as this is the only version we had available)
Two Layers of Virtualisation	32bit	4 cores	4GB	Windows 7 Running inside ESXi, Running Inside VMWare Player on Windows 7. (32bit as this is the only version we had version available)

Results

System	Video(fps)	Super Pi(s)	Disk IO Read (MB/s)				Disc IO Write (MB/s)
			Seq.	512k	4k	4kQD32	Seq.	512k	4k	4kQD32
Windows 7	49.00	25.116	324.7	319.3	29.56	22.76	229.3	218.2	88.89	91.21
Windows 7 in VMWare Player	49.02	26.875	269.9	205.3	16.10	14.70	234.6	224.0	29.0	39.01
Windows 7 in VMWare ESXi in VMWare Player	50.07	29.609	62.07	52.50	3.958	N/R	56.29	N/R	4.281	N/R
Windows 7 in Microsoft VirtualPC†	~18††	Not Run	177.1	170.6	7.806	6.863	116.8	94.01	7.558	9.238

† We happened to run the tests by accident in VirtualPC. It’s fair enough to say it’s pants.
†† VirtualPC Bluescreened when encoding the video.
††† Where a test indicates Not Run (N/R) it’s mostly because it was fast approaching 2:30am, and we mostly had to be in work the next day.

VMWare ESXI running inside VMWare Player Performance Graphs

The general gist is that the CPU is virtually unaffected by virtualisation, but disk performance suffers quite a lot. Whether or not it affects day to day performance is hard to say - here the video re-encoding runs in near same time (quicker, even!) inside two levels of virtualisation. Another consideration are the settings used - the disk when run inside ESXi would only mount as an IDE drive, and was not recognised as an SSD: which might have hampered performance. I’m not sure if more tinkering here would have yielded better results.

The tests also indicate it’s well worth researching your virtualisation software: Microsoft VirtualPC had terrible CPU performance; and dire Disk performance in comparison to VMWare.

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