Performance evaluation and comparison of the top market virtualization hypervisors

The virtualization of IT infrastructure enables the consolidation and pooling of IT resources so that they can be shared over diverse applications to offset the limitation of shrinking resources and growing business needs. It 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 is 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. It is a piece of software that provides a virtualized hardware environment to support running multiple operating systems concurrently using one physical server. The hypervisor type introduces significant impacts on the virtualization environment performance. The intent of this paper is to quantitatively and qualitatively compare the performance of the latest shipping versions of the VMware ESXi5, Citrix Xen Server 6.0.2 and Hyper-Hyper-V2008R2 Hypervisors at time of this study using customized SQL instance as workload simulating real life situations. This Paper helps both IT decision makers and end users to choose the right virtualization hypervisor and their readiness for enterprise datacenters and cloud infrastructure. © 2013 IEEE.