Performance of diverse operating systems and applications in VMware's virtual environment

Abstract

Virtualization is considered a popular topic today. The topic for my research is the performance of diverse operating systems and applications in the VMware’s virtual environment. In this research the mixed methodology was used. This research focuses on the stability and reliability of VMware, its virtual operating system performing and applications on it. The research questions were formulated to achieve the aim of the research. The questions were divided into the primary research question and secondary research questions.

The primary research question was: How do different operating systems and compatible applications perform in VMware’s virtualized environment?

The secondary research questions that helped in answering the main research question were: Which is the current cost effective virtual environment in the market? What constraints if any exist in the use of VMware? Which Operating System and applications perform well on VMware? How is the performance of the virtual operating systems affected with change in resources?

Test environments in which the researcher performed experiments on VMware with various operating systems and applications were set up to record the results on how efficient, stable and reliable the chosen applications performed on different environments. The four main resources that were monitored were the Central Processing Unit (CPU), Random Access Memory (RAM), Disk Space (Storage) and Network usage. Other tasks that were monitored were, the response time to the boot-up and shut-down of the operating systems and its applications. Monitoring of these tasks were conducted using physical tools such as a digital stop watch, analytical tools such as the windows task manager, system monitor etc. The results were then recorded in a matrix/tabular form. Later these results were analysed to answer the research questions.

The purpose of the research is to test the impact of virtual operating systems and applications running on the virtual environment of VMware. Performances of two applications were tested on the three Operating Systems which ran on top of VMware Workstation 6. The virtual environment (VMware Workstation 6) consisted of three operating systems namely: UBUNTU Linux, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition and Apple Macintosh OS X.