Contents
Why?
What?
Where?
The Tests
The Test VM
Apache Cloudstack
Hyper-V
Bare-Metal
XCP-ng
Proxmox / KVM
Results / Comparison Charts
Conclusion
Surprises
Foreword
I am fully aware, that as soon as you post something on the Internet, no matter what, someone will tell you and prove that you are...
I spent a few days comparing various Hypervisors under the same workload and on the same hardware. This is a very specific workload and results might be different when testing oher workloads.
I wanted to share it here, because many of us run very modest Hardware and getting the most out of it is probably something others are interested in, too.
I wanted to share it also because maybe someone finds a flaw in the configurations I ran, which might boost things up.
If you do not want to go to the post / read all of that, the very quick summary is, that XCP-ng was the quickest and KVM the slowest. There is also a summary at the bottom of the post with some graphs if that interests you. For everyone else who reads the whole post, I hope it gives some useful insights for your self-hosting endeavours.
Xcp-ng might have the edge against bare metal because Windows uses virtualization by default uses Virtualization-Based Security (VBS). Under xcp-ng it can't use that since nested virtualization can't be enabled.
Disclaimer: I'm a maintainer of the control plane used by xcp-ng