Performance Combinative Evaluation of Typical Virtual Machine Monitors

As one of pivotal components, the efficiency of virtual machine monitor(VMM) will largely impact the performance of a virtualization system. Therefore, evaluating the performance of VMMs adopting different virtualization technologies becomes more and more important. This paper selects three typical open source VMMs(i.e. OpenVZ, Xen and KVM) as the delegates of operating system-level virtualization, para-virtualization and full-virtualization to evaluate their performance with a combinative method that measures their macro-performance and micro-performance as a black box and analyzes their performance characteristic as a white box. By correlating the analysis results of two-granularity performance data, some potential performance bottlenecks come out.