So, Cloud Central is running a public beta at the moment so I grabbed an account and decided to do some tests.
Cross copying from the wiki page I created on their site:
Initial impressions
– Nice GUI
– Xen based virtual machines
– Asked for a Nano which has 16GB of storage but it was only provisioned with 1GB. Suspect the idea is that additional allocations are made on demand.
Bugs/Showstoppers:
– Resizing the console on Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu causes a complete X11 crash. That’s a serious worry.
– Was never told my default root password had to trigger a reset. Maybe that’s intentional.
– Password reset seems a bit slow/buggy, it works, eventually but there’s no ‘spinner’ saying it’s doing much other than ‘Loading’.
Storage
Doing stock performance benchmarking using iozone on a Nano product.
iozone -azcR -i 0 -i 1 -i 2 -i 8 -n 256 -g 524288 -f /512MB-1Thread -b /512MB-1Thread.xls > /512MB-1Thread.log
– IO looks slow, during the test load went to 4 (~100% iirc) on a Quad Core AMD 64bit CPU.
– I couldn’t do a 512MB test since it apparently ran out of space. My space still hasn’t been freed.
Working just with the 256MB outputs.
Log output here: 512mb-1thread
Network
Network looks quite nice from initial impressions. PipeNetworks peering in Sydney and managed to pull 8-10Mbit from an uncontended source at work. Consistent throughout.
Conclusions
– Xen isn’t really ‘elastic’ cloud it’s more ‘resource on demand’.
– Network seems to be nice
– Storage performance ain’t that great
Will modify this post as more points come up.