Context. Virtualization technologies have been extensively used in various cloud platforms. Hardware replacements and maintenance are occasionally required, which leads to business downtime. Live migration is performed to ensure high availability of services, as it is a major aspect. The performance of live migration in virtualization technologies directly impacts the performance of cloud platforms. Hence comparison is performed in two mainstream virtualization technologies, container and hypervisor based virtualization.

Objectives. In the present study, the objective is to perform live migration of hypervisor and container based virtualization technologies, Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) and Linux Containers (LXC) respectively. Measure and compare the downtime, total migration time, CPU utilization and disk utilization of KVM and LXC during live migration.

Methods. An initial literature is conducted to get in-depth knowledge about live migration in virtualization technologies. An experiment is conducted to perform live migration in KVM and LXC. The live migration process is performed when 100 % and 66% workloads are being generated to Cassandra present in virtual machine and container. The performance of live migration in KVM and LXC is measured in terms of CPU utilization, disk utilization, total migration time and downtime.

Results. Based on the obtained results from the experiment, graphs are plotted for the performance of KVM and LXC during live migration. The results indicated that KVM has better CPU utilization when compared to LXC. However, downtime, total migration time and disk utilization of LXC are relatively better than KVM. From the obtained results, mean and standard deviation are calculated. Box plotting for downtime and total migration time is performed to illustrate difference between KVM and LXC. The measurable difference between KVM and LXC is calculated using Cohen’s d effect size for downtime, total migration time, CPU and disk utilization.

Conclusions. The present study concludes that no single hypervisor has better performance when considering all performance metrics. While LXC has better performance when considering downtime, total migration time and disk utilization. However, KVM performs better when CPU usage is considered.