Evaluation of different Operating Systems performance in the Private Cloud with ESXi hypervisor using SIGAR framework

Cloud computing model along with virtualization enables scalable infrastructures and provides on demand access to computing resources. Virtualization technology facilitates multiple virtual servers to run on a physical server to enhance the utilization of the server. Hypervisor as a virtualization layer provides an infrastructural support to multiple virtual machines above it by virtualizing hardware resources such as CPU, Memory, Disk and NIC. Hypervisors give near native performance by negating virtualization overhead. ESXi is one of the hypervisors which gives near native performance using full virtualization technique. It is encouraging to study how different Operating Systems (OSs) perform in a virtualized environment in the Private Cloud with ESXi hypervisor. Guest Operating Systems do come in para-virtualized and hardware virtualized flavors. It is innovative idea to compare them from performance perspective to give an idea about their performance variations in different tests. This paper conducts different performance tests with low, medium, high workloads and results are gathered using SIGAR API (System Information Gatherer and Reporter) and explains the behavior of each operating system and gives the reasoning of results with the help of different virtualization techniques. In the experiment, CloudStack (open source cloud computing software) is used to create a private cloud, in which management server is installed on Ubuntu 12.04 - 64 bit operating system. ESXi hypervisor is installed on bare metal as a host in the cluster. The different guest operating systems are installed on ESXi hypervisor and their performances have been evaluated in detail by using SIGAR Framework.