VMShadow: optimizing the performance of latency-sensitive virtual desktops in distributed clouds

• Authors: Tian Guo;Vijay Gopalakrishnan;K. K. Ramakrishnan;Prashant Shenoy;Arun Venkataramani;Seungjoon Lee
• Venue: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference
• Year: 2014

Distributed clouds offer a choice of data center locations to application providers to host their applications. In this paper we consider distributed clouds that host virtual desktops(VDs) which are then accessed by their users through remote desktop protocols. VDs have different sensitivities to latency, primarily determined by the types of applications running (games or video players are more sensitive to latency) and the end users' locations. We design VMShadow, a system to automatically optimize the location and performance of latency-sensitive VDs in the cloud. VMShadow performs black-box fingerprinting of a VM's network traffic to infer its latency-sensitivity and employs a greedy heuristic based algorithm to move highly latency-sensitive VMs to cloud sites that are closer to their end users. VMShadow employs WAN-based live migration and a new network connection migration protocol to ensure that the VM migration and subsequent changes to the VM's network address are transparent to end-users. We implement a prototype of VMShadow in a nested hypervisor and demonstrate its effectiveness for optimizing the performance of VM-based desktops in the cloud. Our experiments on a private and the public EC2 cloud show that VMShadow is able to discriminate between latency-sensitive and insensitive desktop applications and judiciously move only those VMs that will benefit the most. For desktop VMs with video activity, VMShadow improves VNC's refresh rate by 90%. Further our connection migration proxy, which utilizes dynamic rewriting of packet headers, imposes a rewriting overhead of only 13μs per packet. Trans-continental VM migrations take about 4 minutes.