  This paper presents results of the performance benchmarks of the Open Source
hypervisor Xen. The study focuses on the network related performance as well as
on the application related performance of multiple virtual machines that were
running on the same Xen hypervisor. The comparison was carried out using a
self-developed benchmark suite that consists of easily available Open Source
tools. The goal is to measure the performance of the hypervisor in typical
real-world application scenarios when used for "mass virtual hosting", such as
hosting solutions of so called virtual private servers for small-to-medium
sized businesses environments. The results of the benchmarks show, that the
tested Xen setup offers good performance with respect to network traffic stress
tests, but only 75% of the performance of the non-virtualized reference
environment. This application performance score decreases as more virtual
machines are running simultaneously.

Performance