Benchmarking the Performance of Microsoft Hyper-V server, VMware ESXi and Xen Hypervisors

Virtualization is a technology that allows the physical machine resources to be shared among different virtual machines (VMs). It is provided by a software layer called hypervisor or Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). The hypervisor abstracts the hardware from the operating system permitting multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on the same hardware. Many different hypervisors--both open source and commercial-- exist today and are widely used in parallel and distributed computing. While the goals of these hypervisors are the same, the underlying technologies vary. Our target hypervisors in this paper are: Microsoft (MS) Hyper-V Server, VMware vSphere ESXi and Xen. MS Hyper-V Server and Xen are micro-kernelized hypervisors which leverage para-virtualization together with full-virtualization/hardware-assisted virtualization approaches, while ESXi is a monolithic hypervisor supporting only full-virtualization/hardware-assisted approach.
A series of performance experiments are conducted on each virtualization approach of the latest versions (at the time of this study which started in May 2013) for the mentioned hypervisors using Linux PREEMPT-RT as the guest operating system. This paper discusses and compares the results of these experiments.

Publication year:2013

Keywords:ESXi, Full-Virtualization, Hyper-V, Para-Virtualization, Xen