Ubuntu 15.10: KVM vs. Xen vs. VirtualBox Virtualization Performance

KVM and Xen did fine on the timed kernel compilation benchmark while VirtualBox was much slower.

It seems nearly across the board that VirtualBox 5.0 performs poorly with the multi-threaded tests even though it too had access to all of the Intel Xeon v3's threads.

There's only small performance differences in the multimedia encoding tests.

Overall, Xen and KVM were performing well compared to the host's performance. Xen tended to have the most wins while KVM generally came in right behind and the two were very competitive with one another, either are great solutions for Linux virtualization depending upon your specific needs. The VirtualBox results, however, were a bit concerning at least for its stock configuration with it performing poorly near universally in the multi-threaded benchmarks and the behavior in the disk benchmark also being potentially problematic.

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