Over the past two decades, the cloud computing paradigm has gradually attracted more popularity due to its efficient resource usage and simple service access model. Virtualization technology is the fundamental element of cloud computing that brings several benefits to cloud users and providers, such as workload isolation, energy efficiency, server consolidation, and cost reduction. This paper examines the combination of operating system-level virtualization (containers) and hardware-level virtualization (virtual machines). To this end, the performance of containers running on top of virtual machines is experimentally compared with standalone virtual machines and containers based on different hardware resources, including the processor, main memory, disk, and network in a real testbed by running the most commonly used benchmarks. Paravirtualization and full virtualization as well as type 1 and type 2 hypervisors are covered in this study. In addition, three prevalent containerization platforms are examined.

翻译：过去二十年中，云计算范式凭借其高效的资源利用与简洁的服务访问模型逐渐获得广泛关注。虚拟化技术作为云计算的基础要素，为云用户及服务商带来了诸多优势，包括工作负载隔离、能效优化、服务器整合及成本降低。本文研究了操作系统级虚拟化（容器）与硬件级虚拟化（虚拟机）的组合方案。为此，在实际测试环境中使用最广泛的基准测试程序，对不同硬件资源（包括处理器、主存、磁盘及网络）条件下运行于虚拟机之上的容器性能，与独立虚拟机及容器进行了实验比较。本研究涵盖了半虚拟化与全虚拟化技术，以及第一类与第二类虚拟机监控程序，并考察了三种主流容器化平台。