Performance Evaluation of VMware and VirtualBox Deepak K Damodaran 1+ , Biju R Mohan 2 , Vasudevan M S 3 and Dinesh Naik 4 Information Technology, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India Abstract. Virtualization is a framework of dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments. More specific it is a layer of software that provides the illusion of a real machine to multiple instances of virtual machines. Virtualization offers a lot of benefits including flexibility, security, ease to configuration and management, reduction of cost and so forth, but at the same time it also brings a certain degree of performance overhead. Furthermore, Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) is the core component of virtual machine (VM) system and its effectiveness greatly impacts the performance of whole system. In this paper, we measure and analyze the performance of two virtual machine monitors VMware and VirtualBox using LMbench and IOzone, and provide a quantitative and qualitative comparison of both virtual machine monitors. Keywords: Virtualization, Virtual machine monitors, Performance. 1. Introduction Years ago, a problem aroused. How to run multiple operating systems on the same machine at the same time. The solution to this problem was virtual machines. Virtual machine monitor (VMM) the core part of virtual machines sits between one or more operating systems and the hardware and gives the illusion to each running operating system that it controls the machine. Behind the scenes, however the VMM actually is in control of the hardware, and must multiplex running operating systems across the physical resources of the machine. Indeed, the VMM serves as an operating system for the guest operating systems, but at a much lower level; the operating system must still think it is interacting with the physical hardware. Thus, transparency is a major goal of VMM. Today virtual machine has become popular due to various reasons. Server consolidation [16] is one such reason. It also serves for security, ease of configuration etc.The different types of virtualizations are full virtualization, paravirtualization. Full virtualization is almost complete simulation of the actual hardware to allow software, which typically consists of a guest operating system, to run unmodified. In paravirtualization a hardware environment is not simulated; however, the guest programs are executed in their own isolated domains, as if they are running on a separate system. The hardware virtualization support enabled by AMD- V and Intel VT technologies introduces virtualization in the x86 processor architecture itself. The emergence of virtualization hardware assist reduces the need to paravirtualize guest operating systems. 2. Related Work There exist many works related to the comparison and performance evaluation of different VMM [11, 12, 13] using different benchmarks. Jianhu Che et al.[1] compared VMM like Xen which is an hypervisor based on the x86 platform, KVM (Kernel–based Virtual Machine) using different benchmarks which includes LINPACK, LMbench and IOZONE. Jianhua Che et al.[2] compared Open VZ, KVM and Xen with SPEC CPU2006, LINPACK, Kernel compiling, RAMSPEED,LMbench,IOzone, Bonnie++, NetIO, WebBench,SysBench and SPEC JBB2005 benchmarks and they found that OpenVZ has the best performance and Xen follows OpenVZ with a slight degradation in most experiments, while KVM has apparently lower performance than OpenVZ and Xen. + Corresponding author. E-mail address: deepakkakkeel@gmail.com. 23 2012 IACSIT Hong Kong Conferences IPCSIT vol. 29 (2012) © (2012) IACSIT Press, Singapore