Here are preliminary results of very simple "benchmarks" on different hypervisors.

Host Hardware:

• CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
• MB: MS-7250
• 6GB RAM
• 200GB SATA Maxtor disk

Guest Hardware:

• 1xCPU
• 1GB RAM
• 10GB virtual disk
• 1x Bridged Network

Guest Setup:

• installed fresh CentOS 7.4 from CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1708.iso

• installed updates:

  yum update -y

• disable selinux (its sole purpose is to break things):

  # WARNING! "sed" breaks symbolik links with `-i.bak` option - we must edit link target...
  # see https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=45982#p195392
  sed -i.bak -e 's/^SELINUX=.*/SELINUX=disabled/' /etc/selinux/config

• disable interfering services:

  systemctl stop crond.service
  systemctl disable crond.service
  systemctl stop tuned
  systemctl disable tuned
  systemctl stop postfix
  systemctl disable postfix

• reboot:

  init 6

• verify that selinux is really disabled:

  sestatus
    SELinux status:                 disabled

• installed appropriate guest tools:

  • oVirt (KVM/QEMU) - yum install qemu-guest-agent
  • XenServer cd /mnt/cdrom/Linux;sh ./install.sh
  • ESXi yum install open-vm-tools

• installed MariaDB with benchmarks:

  yum install mariadb-bench mariadb-server
  systemctl enable mariadb
  systemctl restart mariadb

• tested MySQL/MariaDB version: MySQL 5.5.56 MariaDB

WARNING!

According to http://www.tocker.ca/plan-to-remove-sql-bench-from-mysql-5-7.html

In the MySQL team, we are planning to remove sql-bench from the MySQL 5.7 sources.

My Note: poor Oracle is fixing things by removing them - maybe inspired by systemd - which "fixed" incorrect StandardOutput behaviour with syslog(2) by removing Syslog output entirely, see

• https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/15812
• https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/15807

To quickly install test-ATIS from sources, try:

mkdir -p ~/src
cd ~/src
curl -fLO https://downloads.mysql.com/archives/get/p/23/file/mysql-5.6.51.tar.gz
cd mysql-5.6.51/sql-bench/
mkdir -p ~/sql-bench
# have no clue why these files have bogus .sh suffix that is removed on install...
for i in bench-init.pl.sh server-cfg.sh test-ATIS.sh;do  cp $i ~/sql-bench/${i%%.sh};done
chmod +x ~/sql-bench/test-ATIS 
find Data/ATIS/ | cpio -pvdm ~/sql-bench/

Now you need to manually install several perl packages + mysql (or maria) server:

# for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
sudo apt-get install libdbi-perl libdbd-mysql-perl mariadb-server

Example running test-ATIS under Ubuntu 22.04 LTS:

sudo mysql -e 'create database test'
cd ~/sql-bench/
sudo ./test-ATIS

WARNING! There are some reports on colission with reserved word rank, if your MySQL is too new! According to:

http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2018/04/congratulations-to-oracle-on-mysql-80.html The problem affects:

• (now) Oracle MySQL 8+
• but MariaDB users are lucky:

MariaDB also has 'rank' as a keyword in 10.2 and 10.3 but one can still use it as an identifier.

I have verified that on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and package mariadb-server version 10.6.12-0ubuntu0.22.04.1 the test-ATIS works without problems.

Run following test MySQL (MariaDB) test:

cd /usr/share/sql-bench
time ./test-ATIS

Guest FS was default xfs. Barriers were later turned off using:

mount -o remount,nobarrier /

And ./test-ATIS was run again.

Here are results:

¹) output of vmware -v

²) from elrepo - see https://www.tecmint.com/install-upgrade-kernel-version-in-centos-7/ for installation instructions

³) kernel 4.x reports:

XFS (dm-0): nobarrier option is deprecated, ignoring.

So at least for this version there is explanation.

⁴) I used following for tests under Windows 2008 R2 Server Standard SP1 (version from ver: 6.1.7601):

• mariadb-5.5.60-winx64.msi (128MB pool - same as in Linux)
• strawberry-perl-5.26.2.1-64bit.msi
• copied /usr/share/sql-bench from Linux to Windows and then run:

  cd \sql-bench
  perl test-ATIS

⁵) Depends on Guest OS:

• Linux -> Use nobarrier option inside guest for XFS filesystem
• Win2008R2 -> Use cache=unsafe option in Proxmox VE host for guest's disk

Xen Notes:

Xen results are very similar with and without barrier - which is strange. However hypervisor reports that it is providing barrier:

dmesg | grep -i barrier
 ... blkfront: xvda: barrier: enabled; persistent grants: disabled; indirect descriptors: disabled;

I have no explanation for this.

Notes for ESXi

• barrier/nobarrier makes no difference (same as under Xen)
• stock kernel 3.x is 2x slower than kernel 4.x from elrepo.
• under stock kernel 3.x there was very high Sys cpu% (typically around 20%), but low IO-wait (which means that disk access was OK, but something very slow in kernel).
• results were very inconsistent under kernel 3.x (and Xen-like deterministic under elrepo's kernel 4.x)
• maybe here is explanation

  # dmesg on kernel 3.x
  Booting paravirtualized kernel on bare hardware
  # dmesg on kernel 4.x
  Booting paravirtualized kernel on VMware hypervisor 

  (both Xen and KVM/QEMU have lot of virtualization hooks for better speed)
• same behavior was observed under ESXi 5.1U3 build 3872664 (see also ESXi 5.1 tips how it was installed).

Under ESXi 5.5 there is empty output from perf top command. Fortunately there is solution at https://stackoverflow.com/a/35802635 - use -e cpu-clock for example:

perf top -e cpu-clock

Produces:

Samples: 41K of event 'cpu-clock', Event count (approx.): 10185093750
Overhead  Shared Object             Symbol
  11.82%  [kernel]                  [k] finish_task_switch
   2.50%  [vdso]                    [.] __vdso_clock_gettime
   2.22%  mysqld                    [.] MYSQLparse
   1.43%  libc-2.17.so              [.] __strcmp_sse2
   1.09%  libc-2.17.so              [.] __memcpy_sse2
   0.93%  [kernel]                  [k] _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore
   0.87%  [kernel]                  [k] system_call_after_swapgs
   0.84%  libc-2.17.so              [.] __memset_x86_64
...

HZ config is following:

grep HZ /boot/config-`uname -r` | grep -v '#'
CONFIG_NO_HZ_COMMON=y
CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL=y
CONFIG_NO_HZ=y
CONFIG_HZ_1000=y
CONFIG_HZ=1000
CONFIG_MACHZ_WDT=m

Using these commands:

perf record -e cpu-clock -ag
# Ctrl-C after few seconds
perf report
# looking for highest self-time

Here I get:

-   12.54%    12.54%  test-ATIS        [kernel.kallsyms]         [k] finish_task_switch                                  â
   - 7.99% 0                                                                                                             â
        0x4080200000001                                                                                                  â
        0x880cd0                                                                                                         â
        0xac07f0                                                                                                         â
        mysql_st_internal_execute                                                                                        â
        mysql_real_query                                                                                                 â
        0x26ca6                                                                                                          â
        0x257ac                                                                                                          â
        0x32b7c                                                                                                          â
        0x31d0a                                                                                                          â
        0x4db71                                                                                                          â
        0xe7fd                                                                                                           â
        system_call_fastpath                                                                                             â
        sys_read                                                                                                         â
        vfs_read                                                                                                         â
        do_sync_read                                                                                                     â
        sock_aio_read                                                                                                    â
        sock_aio_read.part.10                                                                                            â
        unix_stream_recvmsg                                                                                              â
        unix_stream_read_generic                                                                                         â
        schedule_timeout                                                                                                 â
        schedule                                                                                                         â
        __schedule                                                                                                       â
        finish_task_switch                                                                                               â
   - 0.69% 0x1                                                                                                           â
        0x4080200000001                                                                                                  â
        0x880cd0                                                                                                         â
        0xac07f0                                     

Ummm....

Please see dedicated page Hypervisor Memory overcommit tests].