How do we compare Physical and Virtual Machine performance.

[Jellas]

Hi All,

I have questiont to discusss with you all..

How could we compare Physical machine performance with a Virtual machine to understand which one is performing better.

For Example ,  We Have a Physical machine with Dell 2900 with W2k3 OS and IIS application is installed,Once this Physical machine is converted into a Virtual machine, Then I want to compare both server performance.

[RolfW81]

Hello Jellas,

do you have some Applications or Websites on it, were you can compare the times? Or perhaps some monitoring tool to collect performance data?

On a vCenter you only see the Host or VM performance, but not the performance on a different physical machine.

Regards,

Rolf

[Jellas]

Hi RolfW81,

Thanks for the quick reply...

But Still ...... what tools would be used to compare it...?

[memaad]

Hi,

Why you want to compare, do you see performance degradation after converting to virtual machine.

I am not aware of any specific tool, however here is my suggestion.

Check how much time it take to complete any specific task on physical machine and compare it with virtual machine. Also at same time, compare CPU and memory utilization.

Regards

Mohammed Emaad

[weinstein5]

ultimately it boils down to user perception- there are a number of companies out there will allow you to monitor and compare  application performance -

[NuggetGTR]

yeah it all depends on what the application is too, for SQL you can run a trace on a physical and replay the trace on the virtual and see if the performance is better of worse.

There is plenty of synthetic test out there that are pure performance like SQLIO for disk IOPS etc.

I know when we compare we will usually setup something like loadrunner and simulate real world tests but not everyone can have that luxury.

[RolfW81]

Hello Jellas,

do you have an application or othe service which is possible to compare? Or do you just want to cpmare the CPU/RAM/DISK speed? Perhaps with detailed information it would be possible to help you.

Regards,

Rolf

[Jellas]

Hi RolfW81,

Just want to compare the CPU/RAM/Disk..thats it..

But how we will confirm reports corrects, becoz one is on Physical other one on Virtual Environment.

[memaad]

Hi,

For any performance comparing  between physical and virtual machine, I would not call it fair comparison, since virtualization  gives you near native experience.

So to compare, if you have any specific task to compare in physical to virtual , then run the task in physical and then run task in virtual . And then compare CPU  and memory  utilization. This is very basic way of comparison.

Regards

Mohammed Emaad