Implementing Virtual Machine: A Performance Evaluation

A hypervisor is a hardware virtualization technique that allows multiple guest operating systems to run on a single host machine at the same time. Each Virtual Machine (VM) or known as guest operating system emulates all interfaces and resources of a real computer system. Virtualization is beneficial as one of the educational tools to facilitate students’ hands-on experiences and research activities. However, the performance of VM needs to be taken into consideration. We investigate the performance of a set of VMs using Oracle VirtualBox on several host machines, each of which has its own system specifications. We observe the resource utilization of each host machine in terms of its CPU utilization, CPU speed as well as memory usage. Experimental results show that the CPU utilization averages are 51.78%, 60.7% and 62.57% for cases before memory allocation, 1/2 of memory capacity and 2/3 of memory capacity, respectively. It is indicate that the utilization of a host processor is directly proportional to the memory capacity assigned for a virtual machine.