VirtPerf: A Performance Profiling Tool for Virtualized Environments

Several applications in the "physical'' world are being consolidated in "virtual'' environments using different virtualization technologies. An important criteria for this exercise is to understand potential resource requirements and performance levels achieved in virtual environments. Empirical evidence of these can be gotten by benchmarking the application's performance in a controlled manner in virtual environments. These measurements can be used for a variety of purposes from virtual machine capacity planning to building sophisticated performance models to predict performance for loads that cannot be practically tested. In this paper, we present VirtPerf, an integrated workload generator and measurement tool to capture resource utilization levels and performance metrics of applications executing under controlled circumstances in virtualized environments. The tool aims to provide comprehensive measurement-based analysis for applications in different virtualization settings. Additionally, a configurable workload generator can be used to stress and profile applications under different load conditions. We present the detailed design of VirtPerf and a comprehensive empirical study to demonstrate its correctness and capabilities.