  Industry 4.0 describes an adaptive and changeable production, where its
factory cells have to be reconfigured at very short intervals, e.g. after each
workpiece. Furthermore, this scenario cannot be realized with traditional
devices, such as programmable logic controllers. Here the use of well-proven
technologies of the information technology are conquering the production hall
(IT-OT convergence). Therefore, both virtualization and novel communication
technologies are being introduced in the field of industrial automation. In
addition, these technologies are seen as the key for facilitating various
emerging use cases. However, it is not yet clear whether each of the dedicated
hardware and software components, which have been developed for specific
control tasks and have performed well over decades, can be upgraded without
major adjustments. In this paper, we examine the opportunities and challenges
of hardware and operating system-level virtualization based on the stringent
requirements imposed by industrial applications. For that purpose, benchmarks
for different virtualization technologies are set by determining their
computational and networking overhead, configuration effort, accessibility,
scalability, and security.
