Open-source virtualization : Functionality and performance of Qemu/KVM, Xen, Libvirt and VirtualBox

The main purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the most common open-source virtualization technologies available. Namely Qemu/KVM, Xen, Libvirt and VirtualBox. The thesis investigates the various virtualization platforms in terms of architecture and overall usage. Before further investigating the platforms through a series of benchmarks. The results gathered from the benchmarks presents Qemu/KVM as the better in terms of performance in most of the benchmarks. Of these we can count the CPU- and memory intensive benchmarks. For the file-systems benchmarks, Xen delivers performance that is above the other examined virtualization platforms. The results also highlight the performance gained with processor additions such as Intel Extended Page Tables and AMD Rapid Virtualization Indexing, to enable hardware assisted paging