Comparative Performance Analysis of the Virtualization Technologies in Cloud Computing

Comparative Performance Analysis of the Virtualization Technologies in Cloud Computing

Samjhana Rayamajhi1

Department of Computer Scienceand Engineering, International Islamic University Chittagong.

Chittagong, Bangladesh.

Zinnia Sultana2

Department of Computer Scienceand Engineering, International Islamic University Chittagong.

Chittagong, Bangladesh.

AbstractA hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM) is a piece of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines which makes multi-tenancy possible. Multi-tenancy allows multiple tenants to coexist in the same physical machine sharing its resources and at the same time, creates an isolated environment for each of them. Cloud service providers (CSP) can maximize their infrastructures using this architecture by allocating resources from physical machines that are not being fully used. Multi tenancy can be obtained by virtualization, which is the future in the IT world. This research paper provides concept of virtualization along with the performance comparison of some common virtualization technologies using many benchmarks which is chosen as it gives a good idea how the hypervisors performance is. First method of comparison chosen is features comparison, further those virtualization techniques are technically compared along with File I/O benchmark, CPU benchmark sequential read-write performance and memory and cache performance of the VMs running at the top of the virtualized layer is studied, ultimately concludes giving an overall guideline to choose a wise hypervisor depending upon the purpose.

Keywords Cloud computing, virtualization, multi-tenancy, hypervisors, hypervisors performance. Virtual Machine Monitor, virtualization technology.

1. INTRODUCTION

   Alike traditional computing cloud computing arrived with the solution to reduce costs in organizations and at the same time to provide on-demand resources and computation without requiring to create an IT infrastructure.

   To create such environment, cloud service providers (CSP) make use of virtualization technologies so that they can maximize the value of their systems [7]. To avoid other services to interfere with them servers have always needed to run alone in physical machines; but disadvantage of this was the waste of resources which can be overcome by Virtualization by sharing them between the guest operating systems (OS). [1]

   This research deals with the four most common virtualization technologies out of number of virtualization technologies available. They are VM-ware, Virtual Box, KVM and Xen. VM-ware VBox is type 2 or hosted hypervisors where they are more like an application running on a host Operating system. KVM and Xen are native or bare

   metal hypervisors which runs directly on a hardware, in a sense they are both hypervisor and an OS.

2. RELATED RESEARCH

   In recent years virtualization has gained popularity in many different areas such as server consolidation, information security and cloud computing due to an increase in hardware performance of about ten fold in the past decade and the goal to reduce capital and operational costs within the data center. [3]

   In recent history there have been many work of comparisons related to virtualization technologies and Cloud computing itself. The rst performance analysis of various hypervisors started withthe hypervisor vendors themselves. VMWare, as well as the original Xen which compares Xen, XenoLinux, and VMWare across a number of a number of more seamless reports originated, prioritizing server consolidation and web application performance with fruitful yet sometimes incompatible results. A feature base survey on virtualization technologies [4] also illustrates the wide variety of hypervisors that currently exist. Furthermore, there has been some investigation into the performance within HPC, specically with InniBand performance of Xen and rather recently with a detailed look at the feasibility of the Amazon Elastic Compute cloud for HPC applications, however both works concentrate only on a single deployment rather than a true comparison of technologies.

   As these underlying hypervisor and virtualization implementations have evolved rapidly in recent years along with virtualization support directly on standard x86 hardware, it is necessary to carefully and accurately evaluate the performance implications of each system. Hence, we conducted an investigation of several virtualization technologies, namely Xen, KVM, Virtual Box, and in part VMWare.

3. HYPERVISOR ARCHITECTURE AND CLASSIFICATION

   In their 1974 article "Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures" Gerald J. Popek and Robert P. Goldberg classified two types of hypervisor.

   Type 1 (or native, bare metal) hypervisors run directly on the host's hardware to control the hardware and to manage guest operating systems. A guest operating-system thus runs on another level above the hypervisor.

   This model represents the classic implementation of virtual-machine architectures; IBM developed the original hypervisors as bare-metal tools in the 1960s: the test tool SIMMON, and CP/CMS. CP/CMS was the ancestor of IBM's z/VM. Modern equivalents include Oracle VM Server for SPARC, Oracle VM Server for x86, the Citrix XenServer, VMware ESX/ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V 2008/2012.

   Type 2 (or hosted) hypervisors run within a conventional operating-system environment. With the hypervisor layer as a distinct second software level, guest operating-systems run at the third level above the hardware. VMware Workstation and VirtualBox exemplify Type 2 hypervisors.

   Fig.1: hypervisor classification

4. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

   In order to perform this tests required to compare the hypervisors I virtualized my system which have following specifications Processor: Intel Core i5 430M (2.26GHz, 1066MHz, 3MB) OS: Windows 8 Professional (32- bit)Memory: 4GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1066MHz Storage: 320GB 7200rpm HDD. I have also virtualized my external 1Tb hard disk to run the test concurrently. At the top of the every virtualization technology three instances of the operating system is created where one of them is Linux Ubuntu and other two are windows 7 operating system.

   Each instance is configured with same hardware configuration where they are assigned with 1 GB memory, 1 processor,20GB hard disk with NAT network adapter and USB controller present.

5. COMPARISON

   1. Feature comparison

      With the wide and large number of potential choices of virtualization technologies available, it is often difcult for users to identify which platform is best suited for their needs. Basically none of the virtualization technique is bad but the degree of its superlative depends upon the need. In order to simplify this task of choosing, a detailed comparison chart between VMWare ESX, VirtualBox 3.2, Xen 3.1 and KVM from RHEL5 is provided. The rst way chose of comparison is the virtualization method.

      Table 1. Features comparison table

      	Xen	KVM	VBox	VMWare
      Para- virtualization	Yes	No	No	No
      Full virtualization	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
      Host PC	x86, x86- 64, IA-64	x86, x86- 64, IA64, PPC	x86, x86-64	x86, x86-64
      Guest PC	x86, x86- 64, IA-64	x86, x86- 64, IA64, PPC	x86, x86-64	x86, x86-64
      Host OS	Linux, UNIX	Linux	Windows, Linux, UNIX	Proprietary UNIX
      Guest OS	Linux, Windows, UNIX	Linux, Windows, UNIX	Linux, Windows, UNIX	Linux, Windows, UNIX
      VT-x/AMD-v	Opt	Req	Opt	Opt
      Cores supported	128	16	32	8
      Memory supported	4TB	4TB	16GB	64GB
      3DAcceleratio n	Xen-GL	VMGL	Open-GL	Open-GL, DiectX
      Live Migration	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
      License	GPL	GPL	GPL/propri etary	Proprietary

      Technical Comparison (VM ware & Vbox)

      In technical comparisons between the virtualization techniques certain few points are considered though there can be many other functionality to be considered.

      In host operating system support, I found virtual box is better and configuring, updating and editing is easier in virtual box then that of VM-ware. VM ware is better in USB support. Virtual box supports relatively larger range of virtual hard disks. Teleportation or migration of VM in virtual box is better along with the command line options where copying and editing is very easy. In case of graphics and Ovf support it is found that VM-ware is better.

      Table 2.Technical Comparison (VM ware &Vbox)

   2. Benchmark performance comparisons

      1. CPU speed

         100

         80

         vmware vbox kvm

         xen

         60

         40

         20

         	VMware	Virtual box
         Host OS support		Better
         VM editing		Better
         USB support	Better
         Range of virtual hard disk		Better
         Remote connection		Better
         VM cloning		Better
         Graphics	Better
         Cmd line		Better
         Teleportation		Better
         Ovf support	better

         Technical comparison between XEN & KVM

         Similarly the comparison between KVM and XEN says that in host operating system KVM isnt an option on older CPUs made before the virtualization extensions were developed, and it rules out newer CPUs like Intel atom CPUs that dont include virtualization technique.

         XEN is very widely used in the market then KVM. In case of Operating System overhead XEn is less burdened with any operating system overhead that is unrelated to processing a series of guests on a given machine. XEN ensures the high security via variety of features like guest isolation, privileged access, small code base and operating system separation. XEN hypervisor has been introduced long time back. It is available since 2004 and is the first open source hypervisor to successfully be deployed by Linux vendors. Xen uses its own kernel for thread scheduling and dispatching VMs while KVM accepted into mainline Linux kernel sources. KVM is generally considered easier to configure and operate.

         In memory page sharing XEN does not implement memory page sharing and KVM does it very efficiently. KVM has many performance benefits like less I/O Latency due to lack of Dom 0.

         Table 4.Technical comparison between XEN & KVM

         	KVM	XEN
         Host OS		Better
         Market		Better
         OS overhead		Better
         Security		Better
         Maturity		Better
         Memory Page Sharing	Better
         Ease of use	Better
         I/O latency	Better

         0

         Fig. 2:CPU overhead performance

         In Sysbench simple CPU load performance we see a very dominance time which implies that the system spend the most time on syscalls or IRQ servicing routines. Comparatively Xen seems to be the winner.

      2. Cache and memory performance

         8.6

         8.4

         VM ware V box KVM

         XEN

         8.2

         8

         7.8

         7.6

         7.4

         7.2

         7

         Fig. 3:Cache and memory performance

         Cache and memory speed performance shows that Xen is slight faster and least Vm ware and vbox. It seems that Xen do a good use of nested page table feature.

      3. Sequential read performance(Gb/s)

         3

         VM-ware Vbox KVM

         XEN

         2.5

         2

         1.5

         1

         0.5

         0

         Fig. 4: Sequential read performance.

         In sequential read test KVM is much slower it is due to very poor caching and great I/O overhead.

      4. Sequential write performance(Mb/s) VII. CONCLUSION

   350

   300

   250

   200

   150

   100

   50

   0

   Fig. 5: Sequential write performance

   In conclusion, it is the authors projection that none of the virtualization technologies can be marked as best or worst because every technologies are efficient enough in their own way of computing. KVMs feature-rich experience and near- native performance makes it a natural t for deployment in an environment where usability and performance are paramount. In some tests, VM ware and Vbox has also shown its remarkable performance so it is very hard to conclude with one best name. On the other side XEN is also very remarkable in security and memory sub system.

   Vm ware V box KVM

   XEN

   Primary goal of this manuscript is to understand the threats that virtualization and multi-tenancy together brings in the

   Sequential write test amazed us the faster is Virtual Box it seems like it use a write back cache algorithm while the other use a write through policy, though greater risk of data loss in spite of speed.in this test KVM and Xen are the clear looser.

6. RESULT AND DISCUSSION

From a feature comparison point of view, most of todays virtualization technologies t the small scale deployment, including VMWare.

In short, each support Linux x86 64 platforms, use VT-X technology for full virtualization, and support live migration. From a CPU and memory point of view, Xen seems to provide the best expandability, supporting up to 128 cpus and 4TB of addressable RAM. So as KVMs vCPU limit. One of Virtualboxs greatest limitations was the 16GB maximum memory allotment for individual guest VMs, which actually limited us from giving VMs more memory for our performance benchmarks. If this can be xed and Oracle does not move the product into the proprietary market, VirtualBox may also stand a chance for deployment in HPC environments.

From the benchmark results point of view in CPU overhead performance and cache and memory performance tests Xen seems to be the winnerWhereas in sequential read and write test Xen and Kvm looks poor. According to sequential read performance surprisingly vm- ware is best and in write test virtualbox is the clear winner.

cloud computing,After our analysis, the answer seems to be a resounding yes. However, we also hope to select the best virtualization technology. After these certain tests we concluded that to benchmark best to any virtualization technology is not possible it depends upon the purpose of the use.

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