A critical evaluation of the performance of virtualization technologies

Given the fact that the virtualization technology improves resource utilization and reduces the operational expenses, it also causes a considerable impact on the system performance in the form of virtualization overheads. With the emergence of virtualization technology, new virtualization platforms are also being developed in the commercial market. The aim of this research study is to investigate the impacts of various available hypervisors on the system performance, with the vision of identifying the optimum hypervisor in satisfying the business needs. Three such hypervisors including VMware, Virtual Box and Virtual PC have been analysed, critically evaluated and compared by adopting the performance benchmarks of formative disk I/O, memory, CPU throughput, and energy consumption. An important outcome of this academic work is the performance evaluation of the three hypervisors and the considerable impact of the corresponding hypervisor overheads on the overall system performance.