Ubuntu 13.10 KVM Virtualization Benchmarks

It's been almost two months since last publishing Intel Haswell virtualization benchmarks, but with the continued evolution of the Linux kernel and the rest of the virtualization stack, here's some new Linux KVM benchmarks from Ubuntu 13.10 in its current form from an Intel Core i7 processor.

In this post are some straightforward tests I did yesterday of the System76 Gazelle Professional laptop running Ubuntu 13.10 (latest packages as of yesterday) "bare metal" and then when a KVM instance was running on the same hardware and configured through virt-manager with an Ubuntu 13.10 guest virtual machine. Originally the plan was to do another thorough performance comparison and also try out the latest Xen hypervisor and VirtualBox too, but Xen was acting up on this laptop and this review sample needs to be sent back to System76 soon, so the testing was cut short. With that said, these KVM benchmark results are just being put out today for some reference values and those curious about the current overhead of this open-source Linux kernel virtualization method.

The same Ubuntu packages were used on the host and the guest VM from the same hardware while the guest was allowed access to 6GB of the system's 8GB of RAM and was able to tap all eight physical/logical CPU cores of the Core i7 4900MQ. A variety of open-source Linux performance benchmarks were run and the results (along with more system information) can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org within 1308296-SO-UBUNTUKVM59. Embedded below are a couple of the performance results showing the performance on the host relative to the single guest VM instance on the Core i7 laptop.
View the rest or run your own Linux virtualization benchmarks using our open-source fully-automated Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking platform.