Today most of the consumer services ranging from education to banking, hospital management to ticket booking are made online. The online services are hosted in cloud and they are mostly time-critical applications. The cloud-based applications depend on datacenter (DC) resources for computation, communication, and storage. The resource utilization in the cloud needs to cope with the dynamic workload and stochastic request spikes. Virtualization is the key technology for effective resource

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... tion in the cloud data center. The type of virtualization technology (VT) that is adapted for the delivery of cloud application ensures the quality of service. The goal of this paper is to compare and contrast the performance measures of various virtualization technologies for heterogeneous workloads. The paper presents the impact of VT in the development of application in the cloud. Each virtualization technology outperforms the other in some or other performance metrics. In spite of the differences, certain virtualization technology dominates depending upon the application requirements in the software development sector.