Comparison of Virtualization Performance: VMWare and KVM

The main purpose of this thesis is to compare the performance overhead of the virtualization infrastructures KVM and VMWare. All the experiments are carried out by using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux(RHEL) Operating System version 6.1. The study focuses on the performance of disk I/O operations, memory operations and CPU operations. The benchmarking tools used are Iozone for disk I/O, Ram Speed for memory and UnixBench for CPU. First a set of benchmarking tests are carried out by using a Bare Metal installation of RHEL 6.1 on a Dell Poweredge R710 server. Next the exact same set of benchmark tests are run after installing RHEL 6.1 on a single virtual machine running on KVM on the same server. Finally VMWare ESXi 5.0 is installed on the server and RHEL 6.1 is installed on a single virtual VMWare machine. In this way the performance overhead of the two virtualization infrastructures KVM and VMWare is measured and compared. Each benchmarking test is run in each of the three cases sufficiently many times to produce statistically significant results. The VMWare I/O disk performance is mostly from 20 to 30% better than KVM, with a few exceptions. And generally the VMWare I/O performance is 10-15% less than the Bare Metal performance. The memory performance overhead is relatively smaller. KVM performs better than VMWare for block sizes of 4MB and less, while the results show the opposite for block sizes larger than 4MB. When testing pure ALU usage, there is almost no virtualization overhead. There was some overhead for the other UnixBench CPU tests and in all these cases VMWare was performing better than KVM. Our general conclusion is that the virtualization overhead is less for VMWare than for KVM. Acknowledgements First, I would like to be grateful to my supervisor Hårek Haugerud for the project guidance and technical support. Thanks for him to make it possible for successful completion of this project. Report writing was a difficult challenge but was finished with his help. The arrangement of mid term presentation made me able to review my progress. Secondly, I would like to thanks to Jarle Bjørgeengen as project provider at University Center for Information Technology at University of Oslo. I would like to appreciate him for his time to time guidance about project directions and special thanks for providing me hardware resource for project. Thirdly, I would like to say thanks to Æleen Frisch for her valuable guidance on project report writing. I learned a lot from the lectures she delivered on report writing and it enabled me to proceed in the right direction. Next my gratitude is paid to Martin Kot for supplying me valid IP addresses and his technical support during the project. In addition, I am extremely grateful to my wife who assisted me in examining the thesis and corrected my English grammar mistakes. Lastly I wish to take this opportunity to express my deepest thanks to my dearest parents, brothers and sisters for their unconditional love, support and encouragement throughout the study. I would also like to convey thanks to my lecturers, professors, classmates and friends. Their academic enlightenment, made my achievements possible during the two years master study. Naveed Yaqub May, 2012 Oslo, Norway