Measuring the Impact of Virtualization on Network Applications

Virtualization has been successfully applied to cell phones, personal computers, and servers, and several efforts are underway to virtualize network routers, home gateways, and many other devices. However, the system designer is often confronted with a wide choice of virtualization techniques, each presenting complex tradeoffs between features and limitations. Most importantly, the impact of each technique on application performance is still not well understood. In this paper the authors measure how KVM, Xen, and OpenVZ, three solutions based on different virtualization techniques, impact the performance of simple network-oriented applications.