vTestkit: A Performance Benchmarking Framework for Virtualization Environments

Virtualization technology has attracted wide attention in recent years as a method to improve resource utilization, reduce costs, and ease server management. However, the performance penalty resulting from virtualization is an unneglectable problem and should be carefully evaluated. To our knowledge, there are few performance evaluating tools developed for virtualization environments. We propose a configurable framework and implement a prototype vTestkit to provide a platform to do performance evaluation for virtualization environments easily, flexibly, and automatically. In this paper, we first discuss the requirements and challenges of performance measurement in virtualization environments, and then present a methodology for characterizing the performance of single virtual machine (VM) scenario and multi-VM scenario. Then we introduce the architecture of vTestkit framework, implement details, and the testing process with vTestkit. Finally, three typical case studies are presented to show that vTestkit can meet the complex testing requirements well and is propitious to various scenarios.