Performance Study on Open Source Softwares for Virtualization Using Hard Disk Benchmarking Tool

The increased resource utilization in IT made the enterprises to use the costly physical servers. These physical servers are under-utilized. Virtualization is a technology with efficient and better utilization of resources. Virtualization divides the resources of a computer into multiple isolated partitions called virtual machines. There are several virtualization techniques which provide similar features but differ in method of implementation and complexity. Many open source softwares for virtualization are introduced by different organizations like Virtualbox by oracle, VirtualPC by Microsoft and desktop virtualization by VMware. This paper illustrates the performance of these three representative open source softwares for virtualization with respect to transfer rate, burst rate, CPU usage and access time while reading from the hard disk using hard disk benchmarking tool HD-Tune.