Abstract

Microsoft MS Hyper-V is a native hypervisor that enables platform virtualization on x86-64 systems It is a microkernelized 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 Paravirtualization 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