Hypervisor Performance Assessment In Virtualization

Server consolidation has become an essential part of information technology planning to lessen the cost and increase efficiency in today's enterprise data centers.The advent of resource virtualization allows consolidation of multiple applications into virtual servers hosted on a single or multiple physical servers.Virtualization and cloud technology work hand-in-hand and has come along a long way to change everyday computing.Many corporate bodies find it ideal to reduce the amount of money spent in purchasing,installing and maintaining on-site computers and its associated equipment.Many industry specialists envisage that its usage will grow widely in businesses over the subsequent years due to its reputation and the benefits it offers,such us lower costs,consolidation of infrastructure,security,better employee productivity,Easy management and much more.Virtualization has contributed immensely to the success of cloud computing because it serves as the core on which clouds are built.However,despite its outstanding features,there are performance challenges and other security vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.However,only a very small amount of research has been conducted,most especially on the performance of virtualization programs.When dealing with virtualization,performance is of primary importance.The primary purpose of this research study is to assess the performance of two well-known virtualization platforms;VMware ESXi 6.5 and Citrix XenServer 7.0 by comparing their overall performance by analyzing resources such as Central processing unit(CPU),Memory,Disk,and Network.The systems analysis was done by using Microsoft Windows Server 2008(64-bit)as the Guest Operating System and Passmark Performance Test benchmark software as the core analysis software.The preferred research methodology for this thesis is a mixed research methodology based on both quantitative and qualitative.A mixed research methodology permits the researcher to easily gather primary data through qualitative methods and then analyze the data using quantitative methods.The empirical findings of the research thesis reveal that there are performance variations between the two hypervisors.The experiments conducted showed that the performance of the VMWare ESXi 6.5 was higher than the performance of the Citrix XenServer 7.0 in terms of overall output.VMWare ESXi is well patronized by many Enterprises in the corporate world because of its track record of robustness and its many reliable features.Citrix XenServer on the other hand also meet the feature and performance requirements for creating reliable virtual environments thus it's a keen competitor to VMWare on the hypervisor market.This research study opens a new path for research in the area related to the performance of virtualization programs and its accompanying security issues.Data gathered from this study was well tabulated and graphically presented to make meaningful conclusions.The conclusion explores possible directions for future research on the performance of virtualization programs in terms of effective load balancing and failovers.Findings of this research study may help businesses to select suitable virtualization platforms as part of their information technology infrastructure.