Parallels® Cloud Server Performance and Scalability

Performance and Scalability 3 Executive Summary In today’s cloud infrastructure, virtualization plays a crucial role. In fact, many of the benefits of a cloud environment, including high availability, flexibility, and simplified resource management, stem from virtualization. This white paper compares two key aspects of virtualization technologies – performance and scalability – for several common virtualization solutions. Strong performance is a primary requirement for customer satisfaction, as faster technologies deliver a better customer experience. Faster technologies reduce latency, require less hardware investment, and consume less electricity.

It’s equally important, however, to have a highly scalable virtualization solution, so that data centers can continue to deliver high performance as load levels increase. Easy scalability is especially important during heavy sales periods, such as Black Friday in the US, where data centers must handle workloads that are several times heavier than normal. If performance degrades with higher workloads, cascading services outages may result – because as one server becomes overloaded, it puts heavier loads on the other servers, which then become overloaded in turn. In our performance and scalability comparisons, we looked at the most widely used virtualization infrastructure solutions: Parallels Cloud Server 6 (which includes both Parallels Containers and Parallels Hypervisor), Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.7 (the previous version of Parallels Containers), Citrix Xen 6, and Linux KVM. We ran these virtualization solutions on hardware with 48GB memory and 24 CPU cores, which our statistics show is a typical configuration used by hosting providers for cloud infrastructure. 1 To ensure that their data centers are operating as efficiently as possible, system engineers must test every aspect of their cloud infrastructure, from hardware stability to the aggregated performance of software and hardware stacks. Like many companies, we performed our tests using Dell’s DVD Store benchmark, an industry-standard workload simulator for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stacks, which are the most frequently used software stacks. We also used Intel’s vConsolidate, a benchmark for consolidation scenarios. To determine the best virtualization solution overall, in terms of both performance and scalability, we used the geometric mean of the values in each test – a metric that is commonly used to determine the aggregated score of a set of benchmark numbers. These aggregated results show that Parallels Containers significantly outperforms all other virtualization solutions tested: • For the LAMP benchmark, Parallels Containers outperformed Linux KVM by 250% and Citrix Xen by 350%. • For the vConsolidate benchmark, Parallels Containers outperformed Linux KVM by 80% and Citrix XEN by 140%. Moreover, according to the benchmark results, the current version of Parallels Containers showed an 11% improvement over the previous version, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.7. In addition, the Parallels Hypervisor component of...

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