Deploying OpenStack: Virtual Infrastructure or Dedicated Hardware

Cloud computing is a computing model through which resources such as - infrastructure, applications or software are offered as services to the users. Cloud computing offers the opportunity of virtualization through deploying multiple virtual machines (VMs) on single physical machine, which increases resource utilization and reduces power consumption. The main benefit of a virtualized technology relies on its on-demand resource allocation strategy and flexible management. Open Stack is one of the promising open source solutions which offers infrastructure as a service. This paper covers how underlying infrastructure for deployment affects the performance of Open Stack. The aim is to provide a comparative view on the performance of Open Stack while deploying it over a virtual environment versus using dedicated hardware. We conduct three basic tests on both environments to check CPU performance, data transfer rate, and bandwidth. The results show that Open Stack over dedicated hardware performs much better than Open Stack over virtualized environment.