Performance Evaluation of Hypervisors and the Effect of Virtual CPU on Performance

Organizations are adopting virtualization technology to reduce the cost while maximizing the productivity, flexibility, responsiveness, and efficiency. There are a variety of vendors for the virtualization environments, all of them claim that their virtualization hypervisor is the best in terms of performance. Furthermore, when a system administrator or a researcher want to deploy a virtual machine in a cloud environment, which vCPU-VM configuration is the best for better performance? In this paper, prior to evaluating the latest version of hypervisors (commercial and open source), the best virtual CPU to virtual machine (vCPU-VM) configuration as well as the effect of virtual CPUs on performance is analyzed for each hypervisor. We used Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) benchmarking tool as a traffic generator and analyzer. The results have shown that commercial and open source hypervisors have similar performance. As per our observation, the performance of a system would degrade by improper allocation of vCPUs to VMs, or when there is a massive over-allocation of vCPUs.