Virtualization Performance Evaluation for Green IT Deployment in Public Universities

While virtualization was first introduced in 1960’s, it only gained popularity the last few years as the cost of deploying IT started swelling. The popularity can also be attributed to increased network speeds, the need to cut costs of deploying ICT as well as increased computer capacity. Despite the benefits associated with virtualization, there is still concern on performance overheads associated with virtualization. This paper evaluates the impact of virtualization on computing performance. A comparison on performance is done to ascertain if an increase in virtual machines has any effect on virtualization performance. Experimental results indicates that as the number of virtual machines increase, the overall performance of the system is adversely affected. Establishment of optimum number of virtual machines per physical device is highly recommended to ensure acceptable performance levels in virtual machines.