Evaluating the performance and intrusiveness of virtual machines for desktop grid computing

We experimentally evaluate the performance overhead of the virtual environments VMware Player, QEMU, Virtu-alPC and VirtualBox on a dual-core machine. Firstly, we assess the performance of a Linux guest OS running on a virtual machine by separately benchmarking the CPU, file I/O and the network bandwidth. These values are compared to the performance achieved when applications are run on a Linux OS directly over the physical machine. Secondly, we measure the impact that a virtual machine running a vol-unteer @home project worker causes on a host OS. Results show that performance attainable on virtual machines de-pends simultaneously on the virtual machine software and on the application type, with CPU-bound applications much less impacted than IO-bound ones. Additionally, the perfor-mance impact on the host OS caused by a virtual machine using all the virtual CPU, ranges from 10 % to 35%, de-pending on the virtual environment. 1