Effects of Virtualization on Network and Processor Performance Using Open vSwitch and Xen Server

Cloud computing is based on virtualization, where a single physical resource is virtualized into multiple virtual resources. Processor and network virtualization offer many advantages like saving in hardware cost, energy consumption, human effort and management of resources. In this paper we have evaluated the effect of network and processor virtualization using popular open source tools, Open vSwitch and Xen Server. Based on a number of experiments in which we compared virtualized with non virtualized scenarios, we found that the virtual network using Open vSwitch is secure. Moreover TCP and UDP throughput is not much effected but there is an increase in average Round Trip Time (RTT). Similarly, processor virtualization on Xen Server does not affect much the average schedule time in comparison with a non-virtualized machine. We thus conclude that in general a slight decrease in the performance in case of virtualization is not significant as compared with the advantages we get from virtualization when using Open vSwitch with XenServer. This work motivates for the application of virtualization using Open vSwitch and Xen Server instead of using non-virtualized environments for setting up data centers.