Cloud computing has experienced significant growth in the recent years owing to the various advantages it provides
such as 24/7 availability, quick provisioning of resources, easy scalability to name a few. Virtualization is the backbone of cloud
computing. Virtual Machines (VMs) are created and executed by a software called Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) or the
hypervisor. It separates compute environments from the actual physical infrastructure. A disk image file representing a single
virtual machine is created on the hypervisor’s file system. In this paper, we analysed the runtime performance of multiple
different disk image file formats. The analysis comprises of four different parameters of performance namely- bandwidth,
latency, input-output operations performed per second (IOPS) and power consumption. The impact of the hypervisor’s block and
file sizes is also analysed for the different file formats.
