Performance effects of concurrent virtual machine execution in VMware workstation 6

Abstract

The recent trend toward virtualized computing both as a means of server consolidation and as a powerful desktop computing tool has lead into a wide variety of studies into the performance of hypervisor products. This study has investigated the scalability of VMware Workstation 6 on the desktop platform. We present comparative performance results for the concurrent execution of a number of virtual machines. A through statistical analysis of the performance results highlights the performance trends of different numbers of concurrent virtual machines and concludes that VMware workstation can scale in certain contexts. We find that there are different performance benefits dependant on the application and that memory intensive applications perform less effectively than those applications which are IO intensive. We also find that running concurrent virtual machines offers a significant performance decrease, but that the drop thereafter is less significant. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.