Research on Optimizing KVM´s Network Performance

Nowadays virtualization technology has been widely used in the data center and services computing area. Virtualization technology can greatly improve server utilization, simplify server management and maintenance and reduce costs. However, virtualization technology will introduce additional overhead, especially in the I/O virtualization. This paper first briefly introduces the general framework of KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), and then we present a detailed analysis of the KVM´s I/O virtualization methods, network traffic processing, after that we evaluated the KVM´s network performance and concluded the main overhead of KVM´s I/O virtualization; Finally, based on the analysis, we discussed the method of optimizing network performance for KVM.