While virtualization has become a widely accepted means of increasing system utilization and containing costs of IT operations, the potential benefits to be realized may vary widely, depending on the specific virtualization technology enabled.  According to previously published measurements, the system resource overhead required to support large scale virtualization on some systems may be as high as 40%.  
 
iSys has developed a highly versatile and portable virtualization “jitter” test designed to document the system overhead requirements of virtual systems under incrementally increasing utilization.  Initial testing of IBM PowerVMTM virtualization technologies on the IBM PowerTM 595 server documents that even in a fully loaded Power 595 system, PowerVM overhead averages less than 2%.

Here is a link to the full document that covers our testing and results in detail: PowerVM Overhead Benchmark

Terry Keene, President and CEO 
Integration Systems LLC

Paul Short
Director of Engineering
Integration Systems LLC