Jian Wang
ABSTRACT
Advances in virtualization technology have focused mainly on strengthening the isolation barrier between virtual machines (VMs) that are co-resident within a single physical machine. At the same time, a large category of communication intensive distributed applications and software components exist, such as web services, high performance grid applications, transaction processing, and graphics rendering, that often wish to communicate across this isolation barrier with other endpoints on co-resident VMs. State of the art inter-VM communication mechanisms do not adequately address the requirements of such applications. TCP/UDP based network communication tends to perform poorly when used between co-resident VMs, but has the advantage of being transparent to user applications. Other solutions exploit inter-domain shared memory mechanisms to improve communication latency and bandwidth, but require applications or user libraries to be rewritten against customized APIs - something not practical for a large majority of distributed applications. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a fully transparent and high performance inter-VM network loopback channel, called XenLoop, in the Xen virtual machine environment. XenLoop does not sacrifice user-level transparency and yet achieves high communication performance between co-resident guest VMs. XenLoop intercepts outgoing network packets beneath the network layer and shepherds the packets destined to co-resident VMs through a high-speed inter-VM shared memory channel that bypasses the virtualized network interface. Guest VMs using XenLoop can migrate transparently across machines without disrupting ongoing network communications, and seamlessly switch between the standard network path and the XenLoop channel. In our evaluation using a number of unmodified benchmarks, we observe that XenLoop can reduce the inter-VM round trip latency by up to a factor of 5 and increase bandwidth by a up to a factor of 6.
- P. Barham, B. Dragovic, K. Fraser, and S. Hand et.al. Xen and the art of virtualization. In SOSP, Oct. 2003. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- David Chisnall. The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor. Prentice Hall, 2nd edition, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- E.V. Hensbergen and K. Goss. Prose i/o. In In First International Conference on Plan 9, Madrid, Spain, 2006.Google Scholar
- W. Huang, M. Koop, Q. Gao, and D.K. Panda. Virtual machine aware communication libraries for high performance computing. In Proc. of SuperComputing (SC'07), Reno, NV, Nov. 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Kim, C. Kim, S.-I. Jung, H. Shin and J.-S. Kim. Inter-domain Socket Communications Supporting High Performance and Full Binary Compatibility on Xen. In Proc. of Virtual Execution Environments, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Kourai and S. Chiba. HyperSpector: Virtual Distributed Monitoring Environments for Secure Intrusion Detection. In Proc. of Virtual Execution Environments, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. McVoy and C. Staelin. lmbench: Portable tools for performance analysis. In Proc. of USENIX Annual Technical Symposium, 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Menon, A.L. Cox, and W. Zwaenepoel. Optimizing network virtualization in Xen. In Proc. of USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Menon, J.R. Santos, Y. Turner, G.J. Janakiraman, and W. Zwaenepoel. Diagnosing performance overheads in the xen virtual machine environment. In Proc. of Virtual Execution Environments, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Muir, L. Peterson, M. Fiuczynski, J. Cappos, and J. Hartman. Proper: Privileged Operations in a Virtualised System Environment. In USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Netfilter. http://www.netfilter.org/.Google Scholar
- Netperf. http://www.netperf.org/.Google Scholar
- Q.O. Snell, A.R. Mikler, and J.L. Gustafson. NetPIPE: A network protocol independent performance evaluator. In Proc. of IASTED International Conference on Intelligent Information Management and Systems, 1996.Google Scholar
- D. Turner and Xuehua Chen. Protocol-dependent message-passing performance on linux clusters. In Proc. of Cluster Computing, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Turner, A. Oline, X. Chen, and T. Benjegerdes. Integrating new capabilities into NetPIPE. In Proc. of 10th European PVM/MPI conference, Venice, Italy, 2003.Google ScholarCross Ref
- XenFS. http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenFS.Google Scholar
- XenLoop Source Code. http://osnet.cs.binghamton.edu/projects/xenloop.html.Google Scholar
- Zhang, S. McIntosh, P. Rohatgi, and J.L. Griffin. Xensocket: A high-throughput interdomain transport for virtual machines. In Proc. of Middleware, 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- XenLoop: a transparent high performance inter-vm network loopback
Recommendations
XenLoop: a transparent high performance inter-VM network loopback
Advances in virtualization technology have focused mainly on strengthening the isolation barrier between virtual machines (VMs) that are co-resident within a single physical machine. At the same time, a large category of communication intensive ...
Transparently bridging semantic gap in CPU management for virtualized environments
Consolidated environments are progressively accommodating diverse and unpredictable workloads in conjunction with virtual desktop infrastructure and cloud computing. Unpredictable workloads, however, aggravate the semantic gap between the virtual ...
Hybrid CPU Management for Adapting to the Diversity of Virtual Machines
As an important cornerstone for clouds, virtualization plays a vital role in building this emerging infrastructure. Virtual machines (VMs) with a variety of workloads may run simultaneously on a physical machine in the cloud platform. The scheduling ...
Comments