The Performance Of Ubuntu KVM Virtualization

There was a smaller but still evident performance boost between Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 when being virtualized.

The KVM virtualization performance over the past two years has been maintained for the IS.C performance in NASA's NAS Parallel Benchmarks.

With the NAS MG.B test there was some fluctuation with the virtualized guests while the host performance was nearly the same.

Lastly, with MAFFT there was not much of a performance difference when running a clean Ubuntu installation or a virtualized Ubuntu instance over the past two years.

From these sixteen tests that cover a wide range of system performance, the performance of the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine does not appear to have changed greatly over the past two years. In fact, most of the performance changes shown in these benchmarks are attributed to the switch from the EXT3 to EXT4 file-system and other general changes to Ubuntu and the Linux kernel. These tests also show that virtualizing a guest newer than Ubuntu 8.04 is of benefit in some areas.

You can join in on the discussion of these test results and Ubuntu virtualization within the Phoronix Forums.