Research On The Performance Measuring Of Virtual Machine System Based On Intel VT Technology

With the rapid development of computer hardware and architecture, there exists a increasing conflict between the progressively powerful computing capacity of computer systems and the relatively laggard computing paradigm. As made a good tradeoff between quickly developing hardware and various complicated applications, virtualization obtains a wide use. Intel's hardware-assisted virtualization remedies the performance defect of software-based virtualization, promotes the growth and maturity of virtualization and brings a closely same performance for virtual machines to native physical machines. However, in most cases virtualization will incur some performance overhead and so it's indispensable to measure the performance of virtualization systems.After summarized existing virtualization technology and performance testing theory of traditional computer systems, this paper introduces the performance testing methods and specifications of virtualization systems and the implementation mechanism of CPU, memory and I/O operation's virtualization within Intel VT-based virtualization systems. By testing and comparing the performance of CPU, memory, disk and networking in Xen and Kvm, this paper analyzes the factors of popular virtual machine monitors' performance degrade. The details as follows:First, the existing virtualization technology is divided into different sorts according to the level of abstraction, the properties of virtualization in each level and full-virtualization and para-virtualization, two type of virtualization in the X86 platform, are introduced and focuses on describing three implementation mechanism of CPU, memory and I/O operation's virtualization of hardware-assisted virtualization which makes up for software-based virtualization.Second, this paper summed up the methods after determining the metrics of virtualization systems' performance testing and gave a detailed depict to the benchmark specification of existing computer systems and the current level about that of virtualization systems. Third, this paper tested and compared the performance of CPU, memory, disk, networking and OLTP server in Xen and Kvm within different testing environments based on studying their implementation mechanism of two virtual machine monitors.Finally, founded on the above summary of testing methods and research on the performance testing of virtual machine monitors and existing benchmarks and tools of virtualization systems, this paper designed a suite of benchmarks named VMIBench for testing the performance isolation of virtualization systems and presented the testing mechanism and the process of baseline and stress testing in details.