Performance comparison of KVM and XEN for telecommunication services

Sammanfattning: High stability of telecommunication services has a positive e ect on customer satisfaction and thus helps to maintain competitiveness of the product in telecommunication market. Since live migration provides a minimal down- time of virtual machines, it is deployed by telecommunication companies to ensure high availability of services and to prevent service interruptions. The main objective of this research is to assess the performance of various hypervisors in terms of live migration and determine which of them best meets the criteria given by a telecommunication company. Response time and CPU utilization of telecommunication services are measured in non- virtualized and virtualized environments to better understand the impacts of virtualization on the services. Two hypervisors, i.e. KVM and XEN, are used to grasp their characteristic behaviour of handling the services. Furthermore, performance of live migration is assessed for both hypervisors using miscellaneous test cases to identify which one has the best overall performance in terms of downtime and total migration time.