University of Houston

Today Virtualization is everywhere, from enterprise data centers, desktops to high performance computing clusters in the research academia. In last few years, Virtualization has quickly changed almost every aspect of how we manage systems, applications, operating systems, storage, networks and security. To add to this, today we have number of virtualization alternatives at our disposal.

This thesis is going to present a detailed analysis of two of the most popular open souce virtualization technologies that we have today: Xen and KVM. We will discuss how KVM and Xen manage CPU Scheduling, memory management and network I/O in a virtualized environment consisting of several guest virtual machines. Performance analysis of inter-vm communication is done using popular open source benchmarks to evaluate the overhead Virtualization incurs on the system . Role of Virtualization in modern SMP based High Performance Computing systems is also discussed and evaluated.