Is paravirtualization evil?

Posted by Daniel on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Daniel
Published on 2011-01-11T08:26:01Z Indexed on 2011/01/11 8:55 UTC
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virtualization

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vmware-esx

I have an VMWare ESX Server v3.5 with a few virtualized Debian Lenny VMs (kernel 2.6.22 with vmi) running Apache Tomcat 5.5. I enabled paravirtualization, and Disk IO increased from about 240MB/s to 380MB/s, making me a happy admin.

The problem now is that my apache tomcat becomes deadlocked during startup, running with 200% CPU (I have 2 CPUS assigned to the VM), and don't know how to get both: A stable system and a fast system.

I somewhere heared that paravirtualization is legacy anyway and won't be available on newer ESX servers. Is there a replacement for this seemingly performance-improving option, or is it discontinued becauses it is just unstable? What is the state of paravirtualization? Should I ignore it completely?

Thanks for all answers in advance.

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