Virtualization of Linux Servers

Virtualization of x86 servers has been a hot topic in the last decade, culminating in changes in the architecture's design and the development of new technologies based in different approaches to provide server virtualization. In this paper, the authors present a comparative study of six virtualization technologies released under the GPL license. The analysis is done in two steps. First they evaluate the overhead imposed by the virtualization layers by executing a set of open source benchmarks in the Linux host system and inside the virtual machines. Secondly they analyze the scalability of those technologies by executing a benchmark suite concurrently in multiple virtual machines.