Full and Para-Virtualization with Xen: A Performance Comparison

Abstract

Xen is one of the most popular open-source virtualization software’s. It supports the two leading virtualization approaches, Full-Virtualization (FV) and Para-Virtualization (PV).Searching the public resources for performance comparison between these two approaches shows that PV performs the best. But most of the answers are theoretical, based on the implementation of both. For instance, Xen community states the following: “PV delivers higher performance than full virtualization because the operating system and hypervisor work together more efficiently, without the overhead imposed by the emulation of the system's resources”.This paper presents an experimental work based on tests and scenarios to compare the quantitative performance between PV and FV. The quantitative results show indeed the predicted performance gap.