A comparative study of open source softwares for virtualization with streaming server applications

Currently, several streaming servers are available to provide a variety of multimedia applications such as VoD (Video-on-Demand), IP-phone, and IP-TV. As a result, the provision of multiple streaming servers on a single machine using the virtualization technology has become important in order to save the operational/management costs while enhancing the performance and the reliability of the system. In this paper, we show the performance evaluation of two representative open source softwares for the virtualization technology, Xen and OpenVZ, in various configurations of applications on three open source streaming servers, Red5, Darwin, and VLC. Our experimental results indicate that OpenVZ provides the better performance for streaming applications with Darwin and VLC whereas Red5 can run only on Xen.