Parallels hosting sales engineer Anton Selikhov made a very compelling presentation at Parallels’ EMEA Roadshow in which he debunked a little of the recent hype over hypervisor virtualization, examining the benefits of Parallels’ Virtuozzo Containers compared to traditional hypervisors.
Consolidation ratios are the most important contributing factor to hardware costs, and in a head to head study of the total costs of ownership, consolidation using Parallels Containers yields about a 50 percent lower total cost of ownership over a traditional hypervisor deployment.
Requiring high-end servers such as a dual core server with lots of memory, traditional hypervisor consolidation ratios are generally around 8:1, however, Parallels Containers yield around 16:1, meaning that a similar application can run on half as many servers.
Also, by virtualizing the operating system, containers are also slimmer so-to-speak. Generally, it takes about 50 MBs to create a container and about 5000 MBs it takes to create a virtual machine. “There is a single copy of the operating system on the server, and each container has links to that main operating system,” Selikhov said, explaining that copy-on-write technology lets custom data be written in a single container, making the most efficient use of storage — taking up only about 1 percent of the storage needed to load an entire OS.
Chart Source: Parallels
Not only are containers light on storage space, they are also easy on memory. Selikhov notes, “memory is always a bottleneck for virtualization deployments,” however, additional enhancements optimize the use of memory page tables and other memory resources using native server and OS technology, enabling near-native performance. This allows more containers to run on a server before it hits a performance degradation.
This is not to say that Parallels doesn’t want a piece of the hypervisor market — Parallels is soon to launch a hypervisor of its own, however, there are significant cost savings to consider when businesses look to their virualization options.
