Quantitative Comparison of Xen and KVM

The authors present initial results from and quantitative analysis of two leading open source hypervisors, Xen and KVM. This paper focuses on the overall performance, performance isolation, and scalability of virtual machines running on these hypervisors. Their comparison was carried out using a benchmark suite that they developed to make the results easily repeatable. Their goals are to understand how the different architectural decisions taken by different hypervisor developers affect the resulting hypervisors, to help hypervisor developers realize areas of improvement for their hypervisors, and to help users make informed decisions about their choice of hypervisor.