Comparison between common virtualization solutions: VMware Workstation, Hyper-V and Docker

This work aims to present the variations between three common virtualization platforms: VMware Workstation, Hyper-V and Docker in the respect of hardware efficiency with different operating systems (Ubuntu20.04 and Windows 10). Firstly, the differences in the theoretical architecture of these three virtualization solutions are discussed in order to provide a brief reference for the testing of operational efficiency in the following part. Subsequently, some common test applications (sysbench, fio, mbw, Fritz Chess Benchmark and Crystal Disk Mark) were run to test their efficiency in CPU, hard disk and memory. Eventually, these statistics are collected in the form of graphs for comparison. The results of the comparison clearly reveal the advantages of VMware workstation in the efficiency of virtual machine hardware operation, while Hyper-V, supported by Microsoft, is inferior to the former in both ubuntu and Windows 10 environments. Meanwhile, Docker, as a representative of an emerging container virtualization technology, has demonstrated a superior performance closer to physical machine performance than traditional virtual machine technologies because of its unique architecture.