2012 - Red Hat Enterprise Linux KVM Hypervisor I/O: Red Hat and IBM Demonstrate Top Virtualization Performance with KVM on IBM's x3850X5

This paper describes the test environment which is comprised of an IBM System x3850 X5 host server with QLogic® QLE 256x Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), Red Hat® Enterprise Linux 6.3 hypervisor, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 guests. The test results validate that a single KVM guest can handle more than 800,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) and four KVM guests running on the same host can support an aggregate I/O rate of more than 1.4 million IOPS – hitting the “bare-metal” limit of the test storage setup. These results show that KVM can achieve the highest storage I/O performance in a virtualized environment and is ready for the most demanding enterprise workloads.