An Empirical Performance Evaluation of Docker Container, Openstack Virtual Machine and Bare Metal Server

Abstract

Server virtualization is a fundamental technological innovation that is used extensively in IT enterprises. Server virtualization enables creation of multiple virtual machines on single underlying physical machine. It is realized either in form of hypervisors or containers. Hypervisor is an extra layer of abstraction between the hardware and virtual machines that emulates underlying hardware. In contrast, the more recent container-based virtualization technology runs on host kernel without additional layer of abstraction.Thus container technology is expected to provide near native performance compared to hypervisor based technology. We have conducted a series of experiments to measure and compare the performance of workloads over hypervisor based virtual machines, Docker containers and native bare metal machine. We use a standard benchmark workload suite that stress CPU, memory, disk IO and system. The results obtained show that Docker containers provide better or similar performance compared to traditional hypervisor based virtual machines in almost all the tests. However as expected the native system still provides the best performance as compared to either containers or hypervisors.