Performance analysis of virtualized real-time applications

Abstract

This article deals with the impact of virtualization techniques on interactive delay-sensitive applications running in realtime, particularly IP telephony. Many institutions, organizations and home users often adopt the virtualized solutions for their safety, ease of administration and backup. Virtualization, which was chiefly the prerogative of companies and the academic world in its early days, has gradually develop its platform to reach out to the ordinary users who can benefit from running virtual machines. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of a virtual machine on real-time traffic, in our case IP telephony based on the SIP and the RTP, which are now the cornerstone of VoIP technology. This article also analyses the impact of memory size and the number of processor cores on the delay itself and its variance, thus allowing user to have full picture when deciding what virtualization tool to use and how to configure so it performs the best possible way.