KVM, Xen and Docker: A performance analysis for ARM based NFV and cloud computing

Virtualization is a mature technology which has shown to provide computing resource and cost optimization while enabling consolidation, isolation and hardware abstraction through the concept of virtual machine. Recently, by sharing the operating system resources and simplifying the deployment of applications, containers are getting a more and more popular alternative to virtualization for specific use cases. As a result, today these two technologies are competing to provide virtual instances for cloud computing, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), High Performance Computing (HPC), avionic and automotive platforms. In this paper, the performance of the most important open source hypervisor (KVM and Xen) and container (Docker) solutions are compared on the ARM architecture, which is rapidly emerging in the server world. The extensive system and Input/Output (I/O) performance measurements included in this paper show a slightly better performance for containers in CPU bound workloads and request/response networking; conversely, thanks to their caching mechanisms, hypervisors perform better in most disk I/O operations and TCP streaming benchmark.