A Performance Comparison Between Hypervisors And Lightweight Virtualization

Abstract

The term virtualization usually implies talking about hypervisor-based virtualization. However, in the past few years, lightweight virtualization technologies claim to offer superior performance. Virtual machines offer high flexibility and easier management. They also enable flexible scaling,which makes it easier to respond to the varying traffic patterns. But, the traditional virtual machines comes at the cost of overhead and have reduced performance in most of the operations. One high performing alternative to a virtual machine is a Linux container. Containers are isolated user spaces which share host computer’s kernel. This makes processes inside them perform almost as well as if they would be running directly on host. A detailed performance comparison between traditional hypervisor based virtualization and lightweight virtualization has been presented. Comparison has been done between KVM and LXC/LXD. The base OS for both technology is Linux since LXC only allows Linux as guest operating systems. Benchmarking tools and script have been used for the measurements to understand the performance in terms of processing, memory, storage and response time of web server. The result after the comparison show that the Linux containers achieve better performance when compared with traditional virtual machines.