I'm interested in how the ESXi hypervisor's guest network performance compares with guests running under qemu/kvm with SR-IOV enabled.
I'm considering a simple setup, where two hosts are connected with a 10G link and each one runs a linux guest. In one case hosts run ESXi and do not use SR-IOV. In another - hosts run linux, guests execute under KVM and are provided direct access to the network card via SR-IOV.
Ideally I'd want to compare latency and TCP throughput (both using 1500 byte frames and restricting to say, 64 byte ethernet frames) as well as the total cpu utilization on the hypervisor. Any input is welcome, qualitative or quantitative.
Thanks!