Intel Haswell Linux Virtualization: KVM vs. Xen vs. VirtualBox

Disk benchmarking wasn't a main focus of this virtualization testing since only a virtual disk was being used on the host's file-system. However, when comparing these three Linux virtualization methods against the bare metal results, KVM on the Linux 3.9 kernel was performing the best followed by Xen. Oracle's VirtualBox was running just 66% the speed of the host's PostMark mail server performance while KVM was at 96% the performance and Xen at 83% the host's speed.

For the Dolfyn Computational Fluid Dynamics workload, there aren’t any major changes in performance against the bare metal results when running on KVM or Xen. However, VirtualBox is noticeably slower.

The FFTE and HMMer results were similar to Dolfyn where Xen and KVM were leading to great performance results with very little overhead, but Oracle VM VirtualBox was much slower.