Performance Exploration of Virtualization Systems

Virtualization has gained astonishing popularity in recent decades. It is applied in several application domains, including mainframes, personal computers, data centers, and embedded systems. While the benefits of virtualization are no longer to be demonstrated, it often comes at the price of performance degradation compared to native execution. In this work, we conduct a comparative study on the performance outcome of VMWare, KVM, and Docker against compute-intensive, IO-intensive, and system benchmarks. The experiments reveal that containers are the way-to-go for the fast execution of applications. It also shows that VMWare and KVM perform similarly on most of the benchmarks.