Performance comparison of hardware virtualization platforms

Abstract

Hosting virtual servers on a shared physical hardware by means of hardware virtualization is common use at data centers, web hosters, and research facilities. All platforms include isolation techniques that restrict resource consumption of the virtual guest machines. However, these isolation techniques have an impact on the performance of the guest systems. In this paper, we study how popular hardware virtualization approaches (OpenVZ, KVM, Xen v4, VirtualBox, VMware ESXi) affect the network throughput of a virtualized system. We compare their impact in a dedicated and a shared host scenario as well as to the bare host system. Our results provide an overview on the performance of popular hardware virtualization platforms on commodity hardware in terms of network throughput. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.