Performance evaluation of Operating Systems in the private cloud with XenServer hypervisor using SIGAR Framework

Abstract

Virtualization Technology plays prominent role in the success of cloud computing because the delivery of services is simplified by providing a platform for optimizing complex IT resources in a scalable manner, which makes cloud computing more cost effective. Hypervisors give near native performance by negating virtualization overhead. XenServer is one of the hypervisors which give near native performance using para virtualization technique. It is encouraging to study how different Operating Systems (OSes) perform in a virtualized environment in the Private Cloud with XenServer hypervisor. Guest OSes do come in Paravirtualized and Hardware Virtualized flavours and in free and commercial versions. It is innovative idea to compare them from performance perspective to give an idea about their performance variations in different tests and also to analyse the results with respect to Para versus Hardware virtualization techniques. This paper conducts different performance tests with low, medium, high workloads and results are gathered using SIGAR API (System Information Gatherer and Reporter) and explains the behaviour of each operating system and gives the reasoning of results with the help of three different virtualization techniques namely Full Virtualization, Paravirtualization and Hardware Assisted Virtualization. In the experiment, CloudStack (open source cloud computing software) is used to create a private cloud (proprietary computing architecture deployed behind a firewall with full control over infrastructure), in which management server is installed on Ubuntu 12.04 - 64 bit operating system. XenServer hypervisor is installed on bare metal as a host in the cluster. The guest operating systems are installed on XenServer hypervisor and their respective performances have been evaluated in detail by using SIGAR Framework.