Isolation Benchmark Suite is designed to quantify the degree to which a virtualization system limits the impact of a misbehaving virtual machine on other well-behaving virtual machines running on the same physical machine
This benchmark suite includes six different stress tests -
- a CPU intensive test
- a memory intensive test
- a fork bomb.
- a disk intensive test
- two network intensive tests (send and receive)
This Isolation Benchmark Suite has been applied to three flavors of virtualization systems --- an example of full virtualization (VMware Workstation), an example of paravirtualization (Xen) and two examples of operating system level virtualization (Solaris Containers and OpenVZ). We have published a paper: "Quantifying the Performance Isolation Properties of Virtualization Systems". The isolation performance results can be found here.
The results, from the Isolation Benchmark Suite, can highlight the difference between different classes of virtualization systems as well as the importance of considering multiple categories of resource consumption when evaluating the performance isolation properties of a virtualization system