Analysis of virtual machine creation characteristics on virtualized computing environment

Virtualization technology is one of the key technology by explosive growth in several computing paradigm including cloud computing. Specially, some virtualization software stacks widely support virtualization mechanism on various system types including a system which doesn't support hardware level virtualization. Thus the virtualization technique allows various systems to become a computing platform in virtualized computing environment. However, some virtualized systems create critical utilization by computation power during creation of virtual machine. In our research, we analyze creation characteristics of virtual machine on various dimensions like virtual machine, virtualized system, and storage server. To perform our study, we implement an automated measurement method and test bed which employs Xen as hypervisor on top of the cluster systems with storage server for distributing virtual disk images. Our experiments indicate that computational power of virtualized system affects the boot time of virtual machine in our test bed even the heterogeneity is relatively row. Also, the creation of virtual machine creates significant overhead (100%) at initial phase on virtualized system in worst case. Additionally, we provide overhead analysis on storage server through generating workloads by scaling virtual machines.