Benchmarking Linux Containers and Virtual Machines

Graduation date: 2017In data-centers, running multiple isolated workloads while getting the most performance out of available hardware is key. For many years Virtual Machines (VMs) have been an enabler, but native containers which offer isolation similar to virtual machines while reducing overhead costs associated with emulating hardware resources have become an increasingly attractive proposition for data-centers.\ud \ud This thesis aims at evaluating the CPU and Memory I/O performance of containers and VMs (specifically Docker and KVM) against bare-metal for nodes/clusters with single or multiple deployed virtual entities. However, such a process of measuring the performance of each entity in a cluster consisting of several entities is an onerous task and error-prone due to lack of benchmark synchronization, necessitating the development of a solution that allows automated benchmarking. This leads to the second contribution of this thesis which is to develop a new open source tool prototype (Playbench) that would enable repeatable benchmarking, allowing evaluating CPU and Memory I/O performance of each virtual entity (container or VM) in a cluster with multiple virtual entities deployed