A Synthetical Performance Evaluation of OpenVZ, Xen and KVM

Although virtualization holds numerous merits, it meanwhile incurs some performance loss. As the pivotal component of a virtualization system, the efficiency of virtual machine monitor(VMM) will largely impact the performance of the whole system. Therefore, it's indispensable to evaluate the performance of virtual machine monitors with different virtualization technologies. In this paper, we measure and analyze the performance of three open source virtual machine monitors-OpenVZ, Xen and KVM, which adopt the container-based virtualization, para-virtualization and full-virtualization respectively. We first measure them as a black box about their macro-performance on the virtualization of processor, memory, disk, network, server applications(including web, database and Java) and their micro-performance on the virtualization of system operation and context switch with several canonical benchmarks, and then analyze these testing results by examining their design and implementation as a white box. The experimental data not only show some valuable information for designers, but also provide a comprehensive performance understanding for users.