This paper presents results of the performance benchmarks of the Open Source hypervisor Xen. The study focuses on the network related performance as well as on the application related performance of multiple virtual machines that were running on the same Xen hypervisor. The comparison was carried out using a self-developed benchmark suite that consists of easily available Open Source tools. The goal is to measure the performance of the hypervisor in typical real-world application scenarios when used for "mass virtual hosting", such as hosting solutions of so called virtual private servers for small-to-medium sized businesses environments. The results of the benchmarks show, that the tested Xen setup offers good performance with respect to network traffic stress tests, but only 75 of the performance of the non-virtualized reference environment. This application performance score decreases as more virtual machines are running simultaneously.
The measurement of the performance of hypervisors like Xen has been subject to many studies, including barham2003 , @cite_1 , deshane2008 , apparao2006 , cherkasova2005 , matthews2007 , xu2008 , @cite_11 .
@cite_1 @cite_11
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Xen is an x86 virtual machine monitor produced by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and released under the GNU General Public License. Performance results comparing XenoLinux (Linux running in a Xen virtual machine) to native Linux as well as to other virtualization tools such as User Mode Linux (UML) were recently published in the paper "Xen and the Art of Virtualization" at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (October 2003). In this study, we repeat this performance analysis of Xen. We also extend the analysis in several ways, including comparing XenoLinux on x86 to an IBM zServer. We use this study as an example of repeated research. We argue that this model of research, which is enabled by open source software, is an important step in transferring the results of computer science research into production environments. Server virtualization is now required for data center systems to reduce the number of servers. However, it is still unclear which business applications are suitable for virtualization. We present our evaluation results for four types of business application benchmarks on our virtualization system. The results show that the virtualization performance of a TPC-H workload, which mainly executes referencing on a database, uses about 90 of the non-virtualized performance, and that the virtualization performance of the TPC-H workload is better than that of the other benchmark applications. The results of a new performance characteristic for virtualization indicated that application programs, which have performance bottlenecks in disk I Os and low CPU utilizations in a non-virtualized environment, are suitable for virtualization.