Use of Virtual Machines (VM), which concept was introduced by IBM, are increasingly due its benefits like better resource utilization and ease system manageability. Although, virtualization of I/O devices can introduce an overhead due to layer increment between VM and host. This penalty is specially wrong when the requested devices have high sustained throughput and/or low latency. An excellent example of a device that requires both characteristics is a Network Interface Card (NIC). In this work, VMWare Virtual Machine Monitor Network Subsystem is studied and measured to provide a measure of its introduced overhead.
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