Xen and the art of virtualization
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Scale and performance in the Denali isolation kernel
OSDI '02 Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementationCopyright restrictions prevent ACM from being able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading
Xen and the art of repeated research
ATEC '04 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Conference on Middleware
Empirical evaluation of latency-sensitive application performance in the cloud
MMSys '10 Proceedings of the first annual ACM SIGMM conference on Multimedia systems
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In recent years, there have been a number of papers comparing the performance of different virtualization environments for x86. These comparisons have typically quantified the overhead of virtualization for one VM compared to a base OS. It has also been common to present data on the scalability of the system in terms of how many identically configured virtual machines can be run on a single physical machine or the performance degradation experienced when multiple VMs are running the same workload. . However, one important aspect of comparing virtualization systems is often not quantified - the degree to which they limit the impact of a misbehaving virtual machine on other virtual machines. Quantifying performance isolation is challenging because the impact can vary based on the type of "misbehavior". Nevertheless, performance isolation is an essential feature especially in commercial service hosting environments, a key target application of modern virtualization systems, where mutually untrusting VMs run on the same physical machine. In this paper, we present the design of a performance isolation benchmark that quantifies the impact on well-behaved VMs of various categories of extreme resource consumption in a misbehaving VM. Our test suite includes six different stress tests - a CPU intensive test, a memory intensive test, a disk intensive test, two network intensive tests (send and receive) and a fork bomb. We describe the design of our benchmark suite and present results of testing three flavors of virtualization - VMware (an example of full virtualization), Xen (an example of paravirtualization) and Solaris containers (an example of operating system level virtualization). We find that the full virtualization system offers complete isolation in all cases and that the paravirtualization system offers nearly the same benefits - no degradation in many cases with at most 1.4% degradation in the disk intensive test. The operating system level virtualization system experiences severe degradation for the memory intensive test and for the fork bomb test, no degradation on the CPU intensive test and mild degradation of 1.2 - 4% for the other tests. Our results highlight the difference between these classes of virtualization systems as well as the importance of considering multiple categories of resource consumption when evaluating the performance isolation properties of a virtualization system.