A New Disk I/O Model of Virtualized Cloud Environment

  • Authors:

  • Dingding Li;Xiaofei Liao;Hai Jin;Bingbing Zhou;Qi Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan;Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan;Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan;University of Sydney, Sydney;Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In a traditional virtualized cloud environment, using asynchronous I/O in the guest file system and synchronous I/O in the host file system to handle an asynchronous user disk write exhibits several drawbacks, such as performance disturbance among different guests and consistency maintenance across guest failures. To improve these issues, this paper introduces a novel disk I/O model for virtualized cloud system called HypeGear, where the guest file system uses synchronous operations to deal with the guest write request and the host file system performs asynchronous operations to write the data to the hard disk. A prototype system is implemented on the Xen hypervisor and our experimental results verify that this new model has many advantages over the conventional asynchronous-synchronous model. We also evaluate the overhead of asynchronous I/O at host, which is brought by our new model. The result demonstrates that it enforces little cost on host layer.