Virtualization Techniques Compared: Performance, Resource, and Power Usage Overheads in Clouds

Virtualization solutions based on hypervisors or containers are enabling technologies for scalable, flexible, and cost-effective resource sharing. As the fundamental limitations of each technology are yet to be understood, they need to be regularly reevaluated to better understand the trade-off provided by latest technological advances. This paper presents an in-depth quantitative analysis of virtualization overheads in these two groups of systems and their gaps relative to native environments based on a diverse set of workloads that stress CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources. KVM and XEN are used to represent hypervisor-based virtualization, and LXC and Docker for container-based platforms. The systems were evaluated with respect to several cloud resource management dimensions including performance, isolation, resource usage, energy efficiency, start-up time, and density. Our study is useful both to practitioners to understand the current state of the technology in order to make the right decision in the selection, operation and/or design of platforms and to scholars to illustrate how these technologies evolved over time.