Virtualization technologies in web conferencing systems: A performance overview

Abstract

Virtualization is an important technology in data center environment due to its useful features such as server consolidation, power saving, live migration and faster server provisioning. However, virtualization sometimes incurs some performance loss. There are many virtualization approaches including full virtualization and operating system-level virtualization. Different virtualization platforms differ in terms of features, performance and virtualization overhead. Thus, one platform can be more suitable to certain kind of application than another. Applications being virtualized also differ in resource usage. Web conferencing systems become popular as the clients' bandwidth has increased in last years, in educational, researching and business fields. The BigBlueButton is a web conferencing system that allows multiple users join a conference room, having classes and share their microphone, webcam, desktop and files. In this paper, we use KVM and OpenVZ as virtualization platforms to deploy conference systems using BigBlueButton. We explore its virtual performance under a real-world workload and a set of benchmarks that stress different aspects such as computing power, latency and memory, I/O and network bandwidth. These results can be a valuable information to be taken in account by systems administrators, for capacity planning and systems designing. Which, in turn, lead to cost savings for companies.