Performance Comparison of Common Server Hardware Virtualization Solutions Regarding the Network Throughput of Virtualized Systems

Hosting virtual servers on a shared physical hardware by means of hardware virtualization is common use at data centers, web hosters, and research facilities. All virtualization platforms include isolation techniques that restrict resource consumption of the virtual guest systems. Therefore, they setup quotas for the virtual guest systems on the use of processors, memory, and hard disk of the host. However, these isolation techniques have an impact on the performance of the guest systems. In this technical report, we study how popular hardware virtualization approaches, namely OpenVZ, KVM, Xen v4, VirtualBox, and VMware ESXi, affect the network throughput of a virtualized system. We compare their performance impact in a dedicated and a shared host scenario as well as to the bare, i.e. not virtualized host system. Our results provide an overview on the performance of popular hardware virtualization platforms on commodity hardware in terms of network throughput and should be considered when performing scientific experiments in a virtualized environment.