Virtualization technics of the Operating System improve security, isolation, reliability and flexibility of the environments. These technics become a must in large scale distributed system and begin to be used in data transport networks. However, virtualization introduced an overhead which must be integrated to virtualized system performance models in order to forecast their behavior. In this article, we analyse this overhead and give an experimental evaluation of the virtualization impact with XEN over the network performance in high speed network context. We show that the throughput reached with TCP is barely affected by the virtulization at the expense of a growing CPU consumption. Moreover, we study the conflicts between protocol process and standard process to access CPU resources. Finally, we show the impact of the TCP's congestion window size in case of several virtual machines running
