Comunicação apresentada no 3rd Workshop on Desktop Grids and Volunteer Computing Systems, Rome, 2009.We experimentally evaluate the performance overhead
of the virtual environments VMware Player, QEMU, VirtualPC
and VirtualBox on a dual-core machine. Firstly, we
assess the performance of a Linux guest OS running on a
virtual machine by separately benchmarking the CPU, file
I/O and the network bandwidth. These values are compared
to the performance achieved when applications are run on a
Linux OS directly over the physical machine. Secondly, we
measure the impact that a virtual machine running a volunteer
@home project worker causes on a host OS. Results
show that performance attainable on virtual machines depends
simultaneously on the virtual machine software and
on the application type, with CPU-bound applications much
less impacted than IO-bound ones. Additionally, the performance
impact on the host OS caused by a virtual machine using all the virtual CPU, ranges from 10% to 35%, depending on the virtual environment