Hypervisors vs. Lightweight Virtualization: a Performance Comparison

Abstract — Virtualization of operating systems provides a common way to run different services in the cloud. Recently, the lightweight virtualization technologies claim to offer superior
performance. In this paper, we present a detailed performance comparison of traditional hypervisor based virtualization and new lightweight solutions. In our measurements, we use several
benchmarks tools in order to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and anomalies introduced by these different platforms in terms of processing, storage, memory and network.
Our results show that, containers achieve generally better performance when compared with traditional virtual machines and other recent solutions. Albeit containers offer clearly more
dense deployment of virtual machines, the performance difference with other technologies is in many cases relatively small…

Roberto Morabito, Jimmy Kjällman, and Miika Komu. Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E 2015) to be held 9-13 March, in Tempe, Arizona. International Conference on Cloud Engineering Tempe, AZ, USA.