Performance analysis of Xen virtual machines in real-world scenarios

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Xen hypervisor's performance in real-world scenarios, focusing on network and application metrics, revealing good network performance but reduced application efficiency with multiple VMs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive benchmark analysis of Xen in typical hosting environments using an open-source suite, highlighting performance trade-offs.

Findings

Xen performs well under network stress tests.

Application performance drops to 75% of non-virtualized environments.

Performance decreases as the number of VMs increases.

Abstract

This paper presents results of the performance benchmarks of the Open Source hypervisor Xen. The study focuses on the network related performance as well as on the application related performance of multiple virtual machines that were running on the same Xen hypervisor. The comparison was carried out using a self-developed benchmark suite that consists of easily available Open Source tools. The goal is to measure the performance of the hypervisor in typical real-world application scenarios when used for "mass virtual hosting", such as hosting solutions of so called virtual private servers for small-to-medium sized businesses environments. The results of the benchmarks show, that the tested Xen setup offers good performance with respect to network traffic stress tests, but only 75% of the performance of the non-virtualized reference environment. This application performance score decreases as more virtual machines are running simultaneously.