In a recent interview with Datamation, Chris Wright, Linux Kernel Developer at Red Hat, provided an interesting metric about KVM:
…KVM can now achieve 85 percent of bare-metal performance for its virtual guest operating systems, while adding that high-performance I/O is not coming at the expense of additional CPU overhead…
About the platform roadmap he adds:
…KVM is set to get support for what’s called “transparent huge pages,” enabling multi-megabyte memory pages that can be dynamically allocated from 4 kilobyte memory chunks. The addition, he said, will help improve the performance of virtual machines with memory-intensive workloads.