Figure 6 compares the system performance results reported by various benchmarks when running in an identically configured paravirtualized domain and a VT-x domain. The performance of the same benchmark in a native environment is used as a reference. The data are collected on an Intel® S3E2340 platform, with 2.3 GHz/800 MHz FSB Intel® Xeon® processor, 4 GB of DDR2 533 MHz memory, a 160 GB Seagate SATA disk and an Intel® E100 Ethernet controller. RHEL4U1 is used as the OS in Dom0, DomU, and VT-x domains. Dom0 is configured with two virtual CPUs and 512 MB of memory. DomU and the VT-x domains are configured with a single virtual CPU with 512 M of memory and a 20 GB physical partition as its virtual disk.

Figure 6: Performance comparison of paravirtualized vs. VT-x domain
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