Virt-B: Toward Performance Benchmarking of Virtual Machine Systems

Although cloud computing environments often use virtualization to implement resource sharing, the added hypervisor layer between virtual machines (VMs) and hardware resources creates performance overhead. Measuring virtualization performance is thus crucial for running applications efficiently and further improving VM techniques. To address the insufficiencies of existing benchmarking methods, the proposed three-layer strategy fully evaluates VM system performance and includes both a benchmark suite to measure various virtualization scenarios and an automated performance testing toolkit. W idely used in today’s Internet data centers and cloud computing platforms, virtualization improves resource utilization, reduces total own-ership costs, and eases system resource management1 by letting multiple virtual machines (VMs) share the resources of a single physical machine (PM). A VM monitor, or hypervisor, is a softwar