[Devel] Container Test Campaign

[Clement Calmels]

Hello !

I'm part of a team of IBMers working on lightweight containers and we
are going to start a new test campaign. Candidates are vserver,
vserver context, namespaces (being pushed upstream), openvz, mcr (our
simple container dedicated to migration) and eventually xen.

We will focus on the performance overhead but we are also interested in
checkpoint/restart and live migration. A last topic would be how well
the
resource managment criteria are met, but that's extra for the moment.

We plan on measuring performance overhead by comparing the results on
a vanilla kernel with a partial and with a complete virtual
environment. By partial, we mean the patched kernel and a 'namespace'
virtualisation.

Test tools
----------
o For network performance :

 * netpipe (http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/netpipe/)
 * netperf (http://www.netperf.org/netperf/NetperfPage.html)
 * tbench (http://samba.org/ftp/tridge/dbench/README)

o Filesystem :

  * dbench (http://samba.org/ftp/tridge/dbench/README)
  * iozone (http://www.iozone.org/)

o General

  * kernbench (http://ck.kolivas.org/kernbench/) stress cpu and
    filesystem through kernel compilation
  * More 'real world' application could be used, feel free to submit
    candidates...

We have experience on C/R and migration so we'll start with our own
scenario, migrating oracle under load. The load is generated by DOTS
(http://ltp.sourceforge.net/dotshowto.php).

If you could provided us some material on what has already been done :
URL, bench tools, scenarios. We'll try to compile them in. configuration
hints and tuning are most welcome if they are reasonable.

Results, tools, scenarios will be published on lxc.sf.net . We will
set up the testing environment so as to be able to accept new
versions, patches, test tools and rerun the all on demand. Results,
tools, scenarios will be published on lxc.sf.net.

thanks !

Clement,