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
High performance and scalable I/O virtualization via self-virtualized devices
Proceedings of the 16th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
Towards automated provisioning of secure virtualized networks
Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Concurrent Direct Network Access for Virtual Machine Monitors
HPCA '07 Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE 13th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture
Bridging the gap between software and hardware techniques for I/O virtualization
ATC'08 USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference on Annual Technical Conference
The cost of a cloud: research problems in data center networks
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Achieving 10 Gb/s using safe and transparent network interface virtualization
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
Diverter: a new approach to networking within virtualized infrastructures
Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Research on enterprise networking
Getting 10 Gb/s from Xen: safe and fast device access from unprivileged domains
Euro-Par'07 Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Parallel processing
Accelerated virtual switching with programmable NICs for scalable data center networking
Proceedings of the second ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Virtualized infrastructure systems and architectures
sNICh: efficient last hop networking in the data center
Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems
Network traffic characteristics of data centers in the wild
IMC '10 Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
Dark silicon and the end of multicore scaling
Proceedings of the 38th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
SplitX: split guest/hypervisor execution on multi-core
WIOV'11 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on I/O virtualization
VALE, a switched ethernet for virtual machines
Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
Scalable, high performance ethernet forwarding with CuckooSwitch
Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
Shrinking the hypervisor one subsystem at a time: a userspace packet switch for virtual machines
Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
NetVM: high performance and flexible networking using virtualization on commodity platforms
NSDI'14 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
ClickOS and the art of network function virtualization
NSDI'14 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
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In virtualized datacenters, the last hop switching happens inside a server. As the number of virtual machines hosted on the server goes up, the last hop switch can be a performance bottleneck. This paper presents the Hyper-Switch, a highly efficient and scalable software-based network switch for virtualization platforms that support driver domains. It combines the best of the existing I/O virtualization architectures by hosting device drivers in a driver domain to isolate faults and placing the packet switch in the hypervisor for efficiency. In addition, this paper presents several optimizations that enhance performance. They include virtual machine (VM) state-aware batching of packets to mitigate the costs of hypervisor entries and guest notifications, preemptive copying and immediate notification of blocked VMs to reduce packet arrival latency, and, whenever possible, packet processing is dynamically offloaded to idle processor cores. These optimizations enable efficient packet processing, better utilization of the available CPU resources, and higher concurrency. We implemented a Hyper-Switch prototype in the Xen virtualization platform. This prototype's performance was then compared to Xen's default network I/O architecture and KVM's vhost-net architecture. The Hyper-Switch prototype performed better than both, especially for inter-VM network communication. For instance, in one scalability experiment measuring aggregate inter-VM network throughput, the Hyper-Switch achieved a peak of ∼81 Gbps as compared to only ∼31 Gbps under Xen and ∼47 Gbps under KVM.