Virtualization Maturity in Creating System VM: An Updated Performance Evaluation

Virtualization technologies are indispensable in operating data centers and supporting cloud infrastructures, providing cost reduction (CapEx and OpEx), high availability, and disaster recovery. Hypervisor-assisted virtualization is one of the leading virtualization technologies, with the hypervisor being the software layer responsible for presenting the virtualized view of the hardware to system-level VMs. However, the virtualization overhead it introduces has implications into the computing infrastructure performance. This paper revisits key concepts about virtualization, technologies and techniques, types of VMs and hypervisors, and provides an up-to-date comparison between native and VM environments using workload metrics such as CPU and memory scores, disk speed, and network throughput to determine virtualization overhead. Our results show a clear overall trend toward meritorious performance and the maturity of the technologies used to create system-level VMs.