Containers emerged as a new alternative to the virtual machines in large enterprise systems due to their virtualization mechanism that demands a low utilization level of the computational resources. Performance evaluation of Containers and virtual machines provides to practitioners and system administrators information about the quality of the services provisioned for virtualization. The main goal of this paper is to conduct a comparative study of the performance evaluation of virtual machines and containers. In order to accomplish this, a methodology is proposed to evaluate the performance of Docker containers and virtual machines. Additionally, a real-world case study is presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach. For all the experiments, the Docker container shown lower execution times for the requests against virtual machine.