File system performance comparison in full hardware virtualization with ESXi and Xen hypervisors

This paper focuses on the hypervisor type-1 performance comparison, taking into consideration VMWare ESXi and Citrix XenServer platforms. The hypervisors performances are evaluated through filesystem performance testing procedures. For both of the hypervisors, the testing procedures are performed under the same conditions. We have applied Filebench benchmark tool, which guarantees equality and independent of the influence of any hardware or system characteristics. As the guest operating system we have chosen CentOS 6.3 Linux distribution. We have compared native ESXi and Xen hosts performances, for systems with one, two and tree virtual machines. Initially, we have provided hypotheses related to the expected behavior and validated them with the results.