KVM virtualization impact on active round-trip time measurements

Abstract

Active measurements tools transmit probe packets between a sender and a receiver to estimate performance metrics such as round-trip time, jitter and loss. In this paper we evaluate how KVM virtualization affects measurements of performance metrics, specifically the round-trip time (RTT). To understand the impact we investigate the interplay of various environment and measurement parameters with virtualization. A number of experiments are performed in order to investigate which parameters had major impact on the RTT. The paper shows that the measurements are affected by CPU load in the host as well as network load while I/O load seemed to have limited impact.