Performance Overhead Comparison between Hypervisor and Container based Virtualization

TL;DR

This paper compares the performance overheads of hypervisor-based virtualization and container-based virtualization (Docker) on a physical machine, revealing that hypervisors do not always have higher overheads and that performance varies by feature and workload.

Contribution

It provides an empirical evaluation of hypervisor versus container virtualization overheads using a baseline, challenging previous assumptions about performance differences.

Findings

Hypervisors do not always have higher performance overheads than containers.

Performance overhead varies depending on features and workloads.

Docker exhibits lower QoS in storage transaction speed.

Abstract

The current virtualization solution in the Cloud widely relies on hypervisor-based technologies. Along with the recent popularity of Docker, the container-based virtualization starts receiving more attention for being a promising alternative. Since both of the virtualization solutions are not resource-free, their performance overheads would lead to negative impacts on the quality of Cloud services. To help fundamentally understand the performance difference between these two types of virtualization solutions, we use a physical machine with "just-enough" resource as a baseline to investigate the performance overhead of a standalone Docker container against a standalone virtual machine (VM). With findings contrary to the related work, our evaluation results show that the virtualization's performance overhead could vary not only on a feature-by-feature basis but also on a job-to-job basis. Although the container-based solution is undoubtedly lightweight, the hypervisor-based technology does not come with higher performance overhead in every case. For example, Docker containers particularly exhibit lower QoS in terms of storage transaction speed.