Have read quite a few posts/articles on the web, including several QnA threads here at serverfault. However, I am quite confounded by the divergence of opinion. Given that much of what was share was opinion, I tend to rely a bit more on data backed analysis s.a. here link text. The only reason I am unable to trust them 100% either, is that they were using Windows guest, and in my case I want a setup comprising of homogeneous all-Linux Host/Guests, i.e. Host being CentOS, and all Guests being CentOS as well. Also, I believe that there may be few tweakable parameters which can get much better performance out of Xen/KVM. Possibly tweaking the kernel interrupt timer (100Hz / 250Hz etc.) ?
Given that most Cloud hosting architectures typically rely on Paravirtualized setups, I wonder if they are really sacrificing performance ? For an co. running thousands of hosts, a 10% performance loss means quite a significant amount in CAPEX and OPEX.
Does anyone have some research material (hopefully backed by data/statistics) which shows which kind of Virtualization is better for which type of workload ? Especially in a all Linux setup ?
My requirement is for running servers, and my workloads are:- type-1: rdbms, with very frequent writes type-2: rdbms, with very frequent reads type-3: media encoder (audio / video) -- extremely CPU (int & float) and memory intensive type-4: static HTML dispenser type-5: dynamic HTML app-engine (business logic)
The setup planned is for a colo private cloud.
TIA, m