Performance evaluation of windows virtual machines on a Linux host

Abstract

Virtualization has experienced a dramatic expansion recently and today is ubiquitous in modern IT industry since it provides numerous benefits to companies and individual users. It increases efficiency, flexibility and scalability of IT equipment by enabling different software-based environments on a single physical hardware. Each virtual machine is a separate instance that is completely independent and separated from the computer hardware and it runs on emulated hardware. Emulated hardware is managed by virtualization tool that provides lower resources when compared to physical hardware. This paper presents a performance evaluation of three different virtual machines run by three recent versions of Windows operating system, namely Windows 7TM Professional, Windows 8.1TM Professional and Windows 10TM Professional, on a host computer system run by Linux Ubuntu. Performance measurement results show that Window 7 is the most suitable virtual operating system since it obtains the best performance when run on a Linux host.