Installation guide

This is no longer the case; modern virtualization technology has greatly improved the speed of
virtual machines. Benchmarks show that virtual machines can run typical server applications nearly
as efficiently as bare metal systems:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 and KVM recorded an industry-leading TPC-C benchmark with an
IBM DB2 database running in an entirely virtualized x86 environment and delivering 88% of bare
metal performance. Due to resource demands, databases have previously been reserved for bare-
metal deployments only, and represent one of the last strongholds within a datacenter to be
virtualized.
The industry standard SAP Sales and D istribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark found
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 and KVM to demonstrate a virtualization efficiency of 85% when
comparing a bare metal system running on identical hardware.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 and KVM achieved record-setting virtualization performance in the
SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmark recorded by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation
(SPEC), setting the best virtual performance mark of any published SPECvirt result. The
SPECvirt_sc2010 metric measures the end-to-end performance of system components in
virtualized data center servers.
Note
For more details on these virtualization benchmarks, visit:
Red Hat and IBM Achieve Leading Performance Benchmark Results at
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2013/2/red-hat-and-ibm-achieve-leading-
performance-benchmark-results
Red Hat Knowledgebase, SAP-SD Benchmark running in a VM – Leadership Performance using
RHEL 6 / KVM at https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/216943
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) at http://www.spec.org
Red Hat Achieves New Top Virtualization Performance Benchmark with HP at
http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=617594
For more information on performance tuning for virtualization, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 6 Virtualization Tuning and Optimization Guide.
3.4. Disast er recovery
Disaster recovery is quicker and easier when the systems are virtualized. On a physical system, if
something serious goes wrong, a complete re-install of the operating system is usually required,
resulting in hours of recovery time. However, if the systems are virtualized this is much faster due to
migration ability. If the requirements for live migration are followed, virtual machines can be restarted
on another host, and the longest possible delay would be in restoring guest data. Also, because
each of the virtualized systems are completely separate to each other, one system's downtime will not
affect any others.
3.5. Securit y
A virtual machine uses SELinux and sVirt to improve security in virtualization. This section includes
an overview of the security options available.
3.5.1. Virt ualiz at ion securit y feat ures
⁠Chapt er 3. Advant ages and misconcep t io ns of virt ualiz at ion
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