Monitoring VirtualBox Performance

Virtualizers on Type II VMMs have been popular among non-commercial users due to their easier installation and use along with lower cost than those on Type I VMMs. However, the overall performance of these virtualizers was mostly found worse than the latter from VM user’s point of view and, the reasons remain yet to be fully investigated. In this report, we present a quantitative study of VMM performance in VirtualBoxin order to examine the performance bottleneck in this representative Type II virtualizer. Primary performance metrics for VMM and VMs are separately collected and analyzed and, implications of the results are discussed, with the monitoring overhead quantified through well-known CPU, memory and I/O benchmarks. Results show that VMM takes only a marginal portion of resources within the whole virtualizer for the case of VirtualBox and, our monitoring comes with merely a negligible performance overhead and perturbation to the virtualizer.