Virtual Disks Performance Analysis Using Flexible I/O and Powerstat

Abstract

Abstract: Cloud computing has experienced significant growth in the recent years owing to the various advantages it provides such as 24/7 availability, quick provisioning of resources, easy scalability to name a few. Virtualization is the backbone of cloud computing. Virtual Machines (VMs) are created and executed by a software called Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) or the hypervisor. It separates compute environments from the actual physical infrastructure. A disk image file representing a single virtual machine is created on the hypervisor’s file system. In this paper, we analysed the runtime performance of multiple different disk image file formats. The analysis comprises of four different parameters of performance namely- bandwidth, latency, input-output operations performed per second (IOPS) and power consumption. The impact of the hypervisor’s block and file sizes is also analysed for the different file formats. The paper aims to act as a reference for the reader in choosing the most appropriate disk file image format for their use case based on the performance comparisons made between different disk image file formats on two different hypervisors – KVM and VirtualBox. Keywords: Virtualization, Virtual disk formats, Cloud computing, fio, KVM, virt-manager, powerstat, VirtualBox.