Protocol-Dependent Message-Passing Performance on Linux Clusters
CLUSTER '02 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing
Xen and the art of virtualization
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Diagnosing performance overheads in the xen virtual machine environment
Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments
HyperSpector: virtual distributed monitoring environments for secure intrusion detection
Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments
Proper: privileged operations in a virtualised system environment
ATEC '05 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Optimizing network virtualization in Xen
ATEC '06 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX '06 Annual Technical Conference
lmbench: portable tools for performance analysis
ATEC '96 Proceedings of the 1996 annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Inter-domain socket communications supporting high performance and full binary compatibility on Xen
Proceedings of the fourth ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
Virtual machine aware communication libraries for high performance computing
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
The definitive guide to the xen hypervisor
The definitive guide to the xen hypervisor
XenSocket: a high-throughput interdomain transport for virtual machines
Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 2007 International Conference on Middleware
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Advances in virtualization technology have focused mainly on strengthening the isolation barrier between virtual machines (VMs) that are co-resident within a single physical machine. At the same time, a large category of communication intensive distributed applications and software components exist, such as web services, high performance grid applications, transaction processing, and graphics rendering, that often wish to communicate across this isolation barrier with other endpoints on co-resident VMs. State of the art inter-VM communication mechanisms do not adequately address the requirements of such applications. TCP/UDP based network communication tends to perform poorly when used between co-resident VMs, but has the advantage of being transparent to user applications. Other solutions exploit inter-domain shared memory mechanisms to improve communication latency and bandwidth, but require applications or user libraries to be rewritten against customized APIs--something not practical for a large majority of distributed applications. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a fully transparent and high performance inter-VM network loopback channel, called XenLoop, in the Xen virtual machine environment. XenLoop does not sacrifice user-level transparency and yet achieves high communication performance between co-resident guest VMs. XenLoop intercepts outgoing network packets beneath the network layer and shepherds the packets destined to co-resident VMs through a high-speed inter-VM shared memory channel that bypasses the virtualized network interface. Guest VMs using XenLoop can migrate transparently across machines without disrupting ongoing network communications, and seamlessly switch between the standard network path and the XenLoop channel. In our evaluation using a number of unmodified benchmarks, we observe that XenLoop can reduce the inter-VM round trip latency by up to a factor of 5 and increase bandwidth by a up to a factor of 6.