  Virtualization has gained astonishing popularity in recent decades. It is
applied in several application domains, including mainframes, personal
computers, data centers, and embedded systems. While the benefits of
virtualization are no longer to be demonstrated, it often comes at the price of
performance degradation compared to native execution. In this work, we conduct
a comparative study on the performance outcome of VMWare, KVM, and Docker
against compute-intensive, IO-intensive, and system benchmarks. The experiments
reveal that containers are the way-to-go for the fast execution of
applications. It also shows that VMWare and KVM perform similarly on most of
the benchmarks.
