DOI: 10.4018/IJOSSP .2018040103

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Volume 9 • Issue 2 • April-June 2018

Copyright © 2018, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

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Sultan Abdullah Algarni, Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computing and Information T echnology, King

Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudia Arabia

Mohammad Ra Ikbal, King Abdulaziz University , Jeddah, Saudia Arabia

Roobaea Alroobaea, College of Computers and Information T echnology , Taif University , T a’if, Saudi Arabia

Ahmed S Ghiduk, College of Computers and Information Technology , T aif University, Ta’if, Saudi Arabia

Farrukh Nadeem, Department of Information Systems, King Abdulaziz University , Jeddah, Saudia Arabia

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Hardware virtualization pla ys a ma jor ro le in IT infrastructure optimiz ation in privat e data centers and

public cloud platforms. Though there are many advancements in CPU architecture and hypervisors

recently , but o verhead s till exists as there is a virtualization layer between the guest operating system

and physical hardware. This is particularly when multiple virtual guests are competing for resources

on the same physical hardware. Understanding performance of a virtualization la yer is crucial as this

would ha ve a major impact on entire IT infras tructure. This article has perf ormed an extensiv e study

on comparing the performance of three hypervisors KVM, X en, and Proxmo x VE. The experiments

showed that KVM deliv ers the best performance on most of the selected parame ters. X en ex cels

in f ile system per f ormance and application per f ormance. Though Proxmox has delivered the best

performance in onl y the sub-category of CPU throu ghput. This article sugg ests best-sui ted hypervisors

for targeted applications.

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Cloud Computing, Hypervisor, Performance, V irtualization

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The advent of hardware vir tualization technology has laid the foundation for many advanced

technologies, such as cloud computing, IT infrastructure optimization and consolidation, disaster

recove ry, high ava ilability and green computing. Hardw are v irtualization allow s man y guest operating

systems to share the same har dware, as shown in Figure 1. This is done by installing a h ypervisor on

physical hardware and then installing guests on top of the hypervisor. The hypervisor manages all

the physical resources of the host system, like CPU , memory, networ k and storage.

Hypervisors allow not onl y multiple guest operati ng sy stems to share the same physi cal h ardware,

but als o allo w the sharing of abstract physical hardware such that guest operating systems assume that

they are running on physical hardw are. This abstraction has many advantages. Hypervisors simplify

resource management, speed up deployment, use resources more efficiently and offer better control

over infrastructure.

Hypervisors can creat e pseudo hardw are resources for guests that are id le and use these resources

for guests that are loaded and in need of resources. This also helps with many advanced features like