Virt-B: Towards Performance Benchmarking of Virtual Machine Systems

Modern cloud computing environments often use virtualization technology to implement resource sharing. However, virtualization incurs performance overheads due to the additional hypervisor layer placed between virtual machines (VMs) and hardware resources. Understanding VM performance is crucial for running applications efficiently and for further improving VM techniques. Unfortunately, existing benchmarking methods are insufficient for comprehensively measuring virtualization performance. Here, the authors propose a solution that fully evaluates VM system performance. In addition to discussing their three-layer benchmarking methodology, they present a new benchmark suite -- Virt-B -- that measures various virtualization scenarios. They also introduce a performance testing toolkit to automate the benchmarking process and describe three case studies.