Virtual clusters give the illusion of ownership to each co-locating cluster application. Each application exists in its own environment and operating system. The virtualization is achieved by running virtual machines atop every physical machine and implementing policies via special virtual cluster management software.
In this paper, we analyze the network performance and contention through virtual machines, using VMWare as the virtual machine software. The results collected give an indication of the performance degradation to be expected in a virtual cluster due to (a) the level of indirection through the virtual machines and (b) contention effects from different cluster applications sharing physical machines.