A performance analysis of Xen and KVM hypervisors for hosting the Xen Worlds Project

Abstract

Virtualization of the operating system has become an important consideration in the cloud, corporate data center, and academia. With the multitude of available virtualization platforms, careful consideration is needed for selecting the right solution for a specific virtualization application. This research focuses on an analysis of two open source virtualization platforms or hypervisors: Xen and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Evaluations are conducted on the basis of overall performance and throughput, virtual machine performance isolation and scalability for use as a host for the Xen Worlds Project. In doing so, the existing Xen Worlds Project infrastructure, middleware, and virtual machines are migrated to KVM to provide a test bed for the evaluation using a benchmark suite and a set of scripts to simulate user behavior.

Cloud-Based Parameter-Driven Statistical Services and Resource Allocation in a Heterogeneous Platform on Enterprise Environment

“…Although the hypervisor also requires the network resource, it can be neglect. To observe the performance degradation ratio of CPU and memory with an increased number of VMs, we measured the performance of a benchmark program (i.e., OpenSSL benchmark [32]) on a cloud server as shown in Figure 2. OpenSSL is an open source project that provides a robust, commercial-grade, and full-featured toolkit for some secure sockets layer (SSL) protocols [33].…”

A PMIPv6 approach to maintain network connectivity during VM live migration over the internet

“…Virtualization was first introduced when mainframes of 1960's and 1970's were logically partitioned to allow concurrent execution of multiple applications on the same mainframe hardware [8]. Gradually it became popular and started to receive attention from the industry and academia.…”

“…The definition of virtualization has evolved following the advent of relatively inexpensive x86 systems and the adoption of Windows and Linux OSes [8]. A loose definition of virtualization is:…”

“…It has direct access to hardware resources and handles allocation of resources to guests. Hypervisors in this category typically have small footprint 3 [8]. Some require a privileged guest, known as Domain-0 or Dom0, to provide management interface to the hypervisor.…”

“…7 Here we are referring to VM migration over WAN using current live migration implementations where no effort has been made to address change in network-layer address. 8 RARP (RFC 903) is deprecated protocol that allows a host knowing its link-layer address to find its IP address. It was replaced by BOOTP, which itself is superseded by DHCP.…”