  At present, the mostly used and developed mechanism is hardware
virtualization which provides a common platform to run multiple operating
systems and applications in independent partitions. More precisely, it is all
about resource virtualization as the term hardware virtualization is
emphasized. In this paper, the aim is to find out the advantages and
limitations of current virtualization techniques, analyze their cost and
performance and also depict which forthcoming hardware virtualization
techniques will able to provide efficient solutions for multiprocessor
operating systems. This is done by making a methodical literature survey and
statistical analysis of the benchmark reports provided by SPEC (Standard
Performance Evaluation Corporation) and TPC (Transaction processing Performance
Council). Finally, this paper presents the current aspects of hardware
virtualization which will help the IT managers of the large organizations to
take effective decision while choosing server with virtualization support.
Again, the future works described in section 4 of this paper focuses on some
real world challenges such as abstraction of multiple servers, language level
virtualization, pre-virtualization etc. which may be point of great interest
for the researchers.
