A Quantitative Analysis of the Xen Virtualization Overhead

Recently, consolidation on virtual servers has gone from a small market to a massive industry migration which is affecting businesses across different kinds of companies. Virtualization can be useful to help IT organizations to reduce complexity and costs with management, ownership, and energy consumption, providing a flexible environment for the execution of IT services. In this context, understanding the main properties of the virtualization overhead and also quantifying this overhead is crucial for the deployment of applications in a virtual environment. In this paper, the authors present a performance characterization of applications running on the Xen environment, aiming at identifying the most important aspects of the overhead imposed on applications by the virtual system.