Comparative Study for Selection of Open Source Hypervisors and Cloud Architectures under Variant Requirements

Abstract

Cloud computing has been emerging as one of the prominent technologies to the end users which offers pay-asyou-go model with the help of various underlying technologies. One of such technologies is virtualization that forms the foundation for Cloud environment. Virtualization makes it possible to run multiple computing resources (in form of Virtual Machines - VMs) on the same (physical) server at same time, concurrently. Hypervisors, also known as Virtual Machine Monitors (VMM), create, manage and run virtual machines on physical machines. There are many open source hypervisors available viz. KVM, Xen, OpenVZ, VirtualBox, Lguest, LXD etc. In addition, there are many Cloud-computing software platforms available that manage the provisioning of VMs for the Cloud provider. Compatibility issues of these VMM and Cloud architectures are required to be handled for smooth functioning of the Cloud. This research aims to compare and analyze the most frequently used open source hypervisors and cloud architectures, and it would be useful to novice researchers who intend to plunge into the field of Cloud computing with an aim to use open source options for implementation of their Cloud setup.