A Survey of Virtualization Technologies With Performance Testing

TL;DR

This paper surveys virtualization technologies, analyzing their performance issues and testing KVM-QEMU on different CPU architectures to inform deployment choices in data centers.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of virtualization methods and presents empirical performance testing results of KVM-QEMU on modern multi-core CPUs.

Findings

KVM-QEMU performance varies across CPU architectures

Performance bottlenecks are identified in virtualization layers

Empirical data aids in optimizing virtualization deployment

Abstract

Virtualization has rapidly become a go-to technology for increasing efficiency in the data center. With virtualization technologies providing tremendous flexibility, even disparate architectures may be deployed on a single machine without interference. Awareness of limitations and requirements of physical hosts to be used for virtualization is important. This paper reviews the present virtualization methods, virtual computing software, and provides a brief analysis of the performance issues inherent to each. In the end we present testing results of KVM-QEMU on two current Multi-Core CPU Architectures and System Configurations.