Performance Measuring and Comparing of Virtual Machine Monitors

With its growth and wide applications, virtualization has come through a revival in computer system community. Virtualization offers a lot of benefits including flexibility, security, ease to configuration and management, reduction of cost and so forth, but at the same time it also brings a certain degree of performance overhead. Furthermore, virtual machine monitor (VMM) is the core component of virtual machine (VM) system and its effectiveness greatly impacts the performance of whole system. In this paper, we measure and analyze the performance of two open source virtual machine monitors-Xen and KVM using LINPACK, LMbench and IOzone, and provide a quantitative and qualitative comparison of both virtual machine monitors.