An effective cluster management system is the key to solving many problems that arise in the field of distributed computing. One of the major problems is to map applications and available computing resources in such a way that optimal application performance is achieved and resources are used efficiently. The traditional way is to tune applications to the resources which is not always easy or effective. We consider the opposite way that implies configuring resources to the application needs. This leads to the necessity of abstracting resources which can be done with virtualization technologies. In this paper we consider the execution of distributed applications in virtual clusters that are configured specifically to match application requirements to resources. In particular, we investigate performance of NAS Parallel Benchmarks and Hadoop benchmarking suites in different resource sharing scenarios.