Measuring and Analyzing CPU Overhead of Virtualization System

Virtualization as a powerful and convenient technique has been widely used recently. Inserting the VMM between the hardware and operation system enables multiple virtual machines simultaneously running on hardware. However, these changes in system architecture, while improving the whole physical computing resources´ utilization, also pay a certain price for virtualization. How to measure this part of CPU overhead, and how about the relationship between this part of CPU overhead and virtual machine number and the type of workload executing in virtual machine are two important questions to the further research of virtualization performance. In this paper we provide a system to measure the overhead of virtualization. With this system we could dynamically obtain the utilization of computing resource. Based on the analysis to the results of several experiments, we compare and study the relationship between the different factors and the overhead of virtualization. Finally, we predict the probably trend of the overhead under the impact of some factors.