Measuring Overhead Introduced by VMWare Workstation Hosted Virtual Machine Monitor Network Subsystem

Use of virtual machines (VM), which concept was introduced by IBM, are increasingly due its benefits like better resource utilization and ease system manageability. Although, virtualization of I/O devices can introduce an overhead due to layer increment between VM and host. This penalty is specially wrong when the requested devices have high sustained thoughput and/or low latency. An excellent example of a device that requires both characteristics is a network interface card (NIC). In this work, VMWare Virtual Machine Monitor Network Subsystem is studied and measured to provide a measure of its introduced overhead.