[kwlug-disc] Virtualization technology

[William Park]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 10:09:01PM -0400, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 5:05 PM, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:
> 
> > Also, I saw even when the VMs are idle (quiescent system), the the number
> > of context switches and interrupts on the host (physical) go up
> > significantly (130 per second to over 2,000 per seconds). That may be
> > unescapable overhead, and therefore I am asking ...
> >
> 
> And now that I am able to get two VMs up and running on the same physical
> host using libvirt + KVM, instead of VirtualBox, I seems that KVM has less
> overhead than VirtualBox.
> 
> The number of context switches and interrupts is ~ 250 and ~ 470 per second
> with KVM, as opposed to ~ 2,000 with VirtualBox (both cases had 2 VMs
> active at the time, but quiescent).
> 
> So, perhaps all this effort of getting up and running is worth it.

Be careful of those numbers.  It could be, because VirtualBox is more
responsive, has better video, and easier control of USB devices.
-- 
William