A Performance Comparison between Enlightenment and Emulation in Microsoft Hyper-V

Microsoft (MS) Hyper-V is a native hypervisor that enables platform virtualization on x86-64 systems. It is a micro-kernelized hypervisor where a host operating system provides the drivers for the hardware. This approach leverages MS Hyper-V to support enlightenments (the Microsoft name for Para-virtualization) in addition to the hardware emulation virtualization technique.
This paper provides a quantitative performance comparison, using different tests and scenarios, between enlightened and emulated Virtual Machines (VMs) hosted by MS Hyper-V server 2012. The experimental results show that MS enlightenments improve performance by a factor of more than two.

Publication year:2013

Keywords:Hyper-V, emulation, enlightenment, Virtualization