Performance of Virtual Machines Using Diskfull and Diskless Compute Nodes

In this paper, virtual machine performance is determined while stationary and during a live migration process. Benchmarks are used to determine network, CPU, and disk I/O performance of the virtual machines while stationary and migrating. To further examine virtual machine performance, three types of persistent storage techniques are used: Solid-State Drive (SSD), Hard Disk Drive (HDD), and Diskless (Network Boot). Results are given that show the degraded performance of a diskless cloud cluster, due to the network latency of fetch requests located on a networked PXE server. The diskless cloud cluster is compared to the performance of a traditional diskfull cluster consisting of SSDs and HDDs.