Performance Comparison of KVM, VMware and XenServer using a Large Telecommunication Application
Sogand Shirinbab, Lars Lundberg, Dragos I. Ilie · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2014
One of the most important technologies in cloud computing is virtualization. This paper presents the results from a performance comparison of three well-known virtualization hypervisors: KVM, VMware and XenServer. In this study, we measure performance in terms of CPU utilization, disk utilization and response time of a large industrial real-time application. The application is running inside a virtual machine (VM) controlled by the KVM, VMware and XenServer hypervisors, respectively. Furthermore, we compare the three hypervisors based on downtime and total migration time during live migration. The results show that the Xen hypervisor results in higher CPU utilization and thus also lower maximum performance compared to VMware and KVM. However, VMware causes more write operations to disk than KVM and Xen, and Xen causes less downtime than KVM and VMware during live migration. This means that no single hypervisor has the best performance for all aspects considered here.