An Analysis of Lightweight Virtualization Technologies for NFV
Ashay Chaudhary, Anoop Ghanwani, Ramki Krishnan, Felipe Huici, Dilip Krishnaswamy, Peter Willis · 2016
Traditionally, NFV platforms were limited to using standard virtualization technologies (e.g., Xen, KVM, VMWare, Hyper-V, etc.) running guests based on general-purpose operating systems such as Windows, Linux or FreeBSD. More recently, a number of light-weight virtualization technologies including containers, unikernels (specialized VMs) and minimalistic distributions of general-purpose OSes have widened the spectrum of possibilities when constructing an NFV platform. This draft describes the challenges in building such a platform and discusses to what extent these technologies, as well as traditional VMs, are able to address them.