Inception

(Work in progress)

A simple benchmark to measure the cost of nested virtualization. A virtual machine is created and launched, which then creates and launches a virtual machine, and so on to a given depth of nesting. The time to build the virtual machine at each level can then be used as a crude estimate for the penalty of virtualization with that degree of nesting.

Prerequisits:

This test requires qemu installed with kvm support and the libguestfs tools. These can be installed on a Debian-based distribution using:

sudo apt install -y libguestfs-tools qemu-system-x86

Kernel config

To check if nested virtualization is enabled in your host kernel:

cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/nested
# or:
cat /sys/module/kvm_amd/parameters/nested

This should return a "Y" or a "1". Otherwise, unloading and reloading a module may be required, e.g.:

sudo modprobe -r kvm_intel
sudo modprobe kvm_intel nested=1

Usage:

(likely to change):

./inception.py config.json results.csv