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

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 22 October 2015 at 01:00 PM EDT. Page 2 of 5. 32 Comments.

First up are some of the disk benchmarks for the host system and then the KVM/Xen/VirtualBox guests

Benchmark Result

With VirtualBox's reported result outperforming the bare metal system, it looks like VirtualBox in its default configuration for this SQLite database benchmark isn't fully honoring fsyncs to the disk compared to KVM and Xen with the performance being too good. While KVM was the slowest, if you're doing a lot of write-intensive work in your VMs, you are better off letting the VM access a raw partition rather than just setting up a virtual disk.

Benchmark Result
Benchmark Result

With the random and sequential writes, VirtualBox was reported to be faster than KVM and Xen but again may be a matter of its different behavior.

Benchmark Result

When it comes to sequential reads, VirtualBox was slower than the competition.

Benchmark Result

Dbench is another disk benchmark showing VirtualBox's different behavior of apparently not writing everything out to the disk during testing with the reported performance being too good.


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