Performance Evaluation of Virtual Appliances

Virtualization technology has become standard in many computing environments. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are now using virtual machines to deliver multiple software appliances. However, the performance of these appliances when run on virtualized platforms is not well understood. This paper presents a performance evaluation framework for virtualized appliances. The paper is using the XenServer virtual machine system and evaluates its performance on four different classes of workload: voice-over-IP, TCPIP networking, IO disk intensive, and CPU intensive. The primary interest is understanding the scalability of the VoIP application in the presence of the other three classes of workload. The paper also considers a range of different virtual machine configurations.