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Advanced Techniques in Computing Sciences and Software Engineering pp 329–333Cite as

Performance Effects of Concurrent Virtual Machine Execution in VMware Workstation 6

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Abstract

The recent trend toward virtualized computing both as a means of server consolidation and as a powerful desktop computing tool has lead into a wide variety of studies into the performance of hypervisor products.

This study has investigated the scalability of VMware Workstation 6 on the desktop platform. We present comparative performance results for the concurrent execution of a number of virtual machines. A through statistical analysis of the performance results highlights the performance trends of different numbers of concurrent virtual machines and concludes that VMware workstation can scale in certain contexts.

We find that there are different performance benefits dependant on the application and that memory intensive applications perform less effectively than those applications which are IO intensive. We also find that running concurrent virtual machines offers a significant performance decrease, but that the drop thereafter is less significant.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Mr Jeremy Baxter of the Department of Statistics at Rhodes University for his advice when we were performing the analysis for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Security and Networks Research Group (SNRG) Department of Computer Science, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

    Richard J. Barnett & Barry Irwin

Authors
  1. Richard J. Barnett
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  2. Barry Irwin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Richard J. Barnett .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering, University of Bridgeport, University Avenue 221, Bridgeport, 06604, U.S.A.

    Khaled Elleithy

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Barnett, R.J., Irwin, B. (2010). Performance Effects of Concurrent Virtual Machine Execution in VMware Workstation 6. In: Elleithy, K. (eds) Advanced Techniques in Computing Sciences and Software Engineering. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3660-5_56

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3660-5_56

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-3659-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-90-481-3660-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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