Study of the KVM CPU performance of Open-Source cloud management platforms

Nowadays, there are several open-source solutions for building private, public and even hybrid clouds such as Eucalyptus, Apache CloudStack and OpenStack. KVM is one of the supported hypervisors for these cloud platforms. Different KVM configurations are being supplied by these platforms and, in some cases, a subset of CPU features are being presented to guest systems, providing a basic abstraction of the underlying CPU. One of the reasons for limiting the features of the Virtual CPU is to guarantee the guest compatibility with different hardware in heterogeneous environments. However, in a large number of situations, the cloud is deployed on an homogeneous set of hosts. In these cases, this limitation can affect the performance of applications being executed in guest systems. In this paper, we have analyzed the architecture, the KVM setup, and the performance of the Virtual Machines deployed by three popular cloud management platforms: Eucalyptus, Apache CloudStack and OpenStack, employing a representative set of applications.

keywords: KVM, hypervisors, Cloud, CPU performance