Comparing virtualization solutions for NFV deployment: A network management perspective

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a paradigm designed to promote service agility and able to quickly generate revenue, thus encouraging competition among companies in the computer network industry. Besides the advocated benefits of NFV, management requirements should be properly taken into account. The choice of a particular NFV-based technology must consider its management requirements. However, there is still no evaluation of virtualization solutions providing an in-depth analysis from the management point-of-view. This paper presents a performance analysis of three prominent virtualization solutions: ClickOS, CoreOS, and OSv. Our results place ClickOS and CoreOS as the best solutions regarding boot time, response time, and memory consumption. Moreover, based on the results obtained for each performance metric, we provide a broad discussion about the effectiveness of each virtualization solution in fulfilling qualitative management requirements.