Energy efficiency comparison of hypervisors

Congfeng Jiang, Yumei Wang, Dongyang Ou, Youhuizi Li, Jilin Zhang, Jian Wan, Bing Luo, Weisong Shi

Abstract: Highlights•In this paper we compare the energy efficiency of different hypervisors, including VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, XenServer and Docker.•We conducted experiments on six platforms, including 3 typical 2U servers, one desktop server, one laptop, and one ARM64 server.•Different from other experiments with fixed number of small scale of virtual machine deployment, we conducted experiments of different workload levels (intensities) to stress the testing platform to mimic realistic virtualized cloud environments.•We run computing intensive, memory intensive, and mixed workloads inside each virtual machine to explore the energy efficiency characteristics of different hypervisors under different workload levels on different platforms.