Testing the Performance of ESXi in VMware Player written 6 years ago

What happens to performance when you run VMWare ESXi inside VMWare Player?
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
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.
To test synthetic (single threaded) CPU Performance, we run SuperPi and take the time taken to calculate PI to 2 Million places.
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.
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- 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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