Performance Evaluation of Hypervisors for Cloud Computing

The virtualization of IT infrastructure enables consolidation and pooling of IT resources so they are shared over diverse applications to offset the limitation of shrinking resources and growing business needs. Virtualization provides a logical abstraction of physical computing resources and creates computing environments that are not restricted by physical configuration or implementation. Virtualization is very important for cloud computing because the delivery of services simplified by providing a platform for optimizing complex IT resources in a scalable manner, which makes cloud computing more cost effective. Hypervisor plays an important role in the virtualization of hardware. This software provides a virtual hardware to support running multiple operating systems concurrently using one physical server. This research quantitatively and qualitatively compares the performance of VMware ESXi 4.1, Citrix Systems Xen Server 5.6 and KVM Hypervisors using standard benchmark SPECvirt_sc2010v1.01 formulated by Standard Performance Evaluation Committee (SPEC), which generate various Workloads simulating real life situations.