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.