Power Consumption of Virtualization Technologies: an Empirical Investigation

TL;DR

This paper empirically compares the power consumption of hypervisor-based and container-based virtualization technologies under various workloads to understand their energy efficiency and performance differences.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical analysis comparing power consumption of KVM, Xen, Docker, and LXC across different workloads.

Findings

Hypervisors and containers behave similarly in idle and CPU/Memory stress tests.

Network performance varies significantly between virtualization types.

Abstract

Virtualization is growing rapidly as a result of the increasing number of alternative solutions in this area, and of the wide range of application field. Until now, hypervisor-based virtualization has been the de facto solution to perform server virtualization. Recently, container-based virtualization - an alternative to hypervisors - has gained more attention because of lightweight characteristics, attracting cloud providers that have already made use of it to deliver their services. However, a gap in the existing research on containers exists in the area of power consumption. This paper presents the results of a performance comparison in terms of power consumption of four different virtualization technologies: KVM and Xen, which are based on hypervisor virtualization, Docker and LXC which are based on container virtualization. The aim of this empirical investigation, carried out by means of a testbed, is to understand how these technologies react to particular workloads. Our initial results show how, despite of the number of virtual entities running, both kinds of virtualization alternatives behave similarly in idle state and in CPU/Memory stress test. Contrarily, the results on network performance show differences between the two technologies.