Support for enterprise consolidation of I-O bound services

  • Authors:

  • Åge Kvalnes;Dag Johansen;Pål Halvorsen;Carsten Griwodz

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway and Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.;Department of Computer Science, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway and Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.;Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway and Simula Research Laboratory, Sandvika, Norway;Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway and Simula Research Laboratory, Sandvika, Norway

  • Venue:
  • Software—Practice & Experience - Focus on Selected PhD Literature Reviews in the Practical Aspects of Software Technology
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In this article, we evaluate the performance effects of I-O bound workloads on a specific virtual machine, an important component of an enterprise cloud computing infrastructure. In particular, we demonstrate that (1) the I-O workload of one guest system may adversely affect the I-O performance of another for the XEN hypervisor and (2) the general I-O performance is degraded due to various overheads. Next, we have devised a light-weight, complementary, backwards-compatible alternative to hypervisor-based virtualization techniques called BONSAI. Our software provides low-overhead I-O performance isolation by transparently applying traffic shaping to system calls in a cost-effective manner. Using this system, I-O resource consumption can be controlled at a very fine granularity. Furthermore, using video streaming experiments, where we limit the I-O bandwidth available to each service, we show that we are able to achieve the required level of resource isolation on a per process basis with only a negligible CPU overhead and without reducing the I-O performance. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.