Task-aware virtual machine scheduling for I/O performance.

ABSTRACT

The use of virtualization is progressively accommodating diverse and unpredictable workloads as being adopted in virtual desktop and cloud computing environments. Since a virtual machine monitor lacks knowledge of each virtual machine, the unpredictableness of workloads makes resource allocation difficult. Particularly, virtual machine scheduling has a critical impact on I/O performance in cases where the virtual machine monitor is agnostic about the internal workloads of virtual machines. This paper presents a task-aware virtual machine scheduling mechanism based on inference techniques using gray-box knowledge. The proposed mechanism infers the I/O-boundness of guest-level tasks and correlates incoming events with I/O-bound tasks. With this information, we introduce partial boosting, which is a priority boosting mechanism with task-level granularity, so that an I/O-bound task is selectively scheduled to handle its incoming events promptly. Our technique focuses on improving the performance of I/O-bound tasks within heterogeneous workloads by lightweight mechanisms with complete CPU fairness among virtual machines. All implementation is confined to the virtualization layer based on the Xen virtual machine monitor and the credit scheduler. We evaluate our prototype in terms of I/O performance and CPU fairness over synthetic mixed workloads and realistic applications.

References

1. Sun virtual desktop infrastructure software. http://www.sun.com/software/vdi/.
2. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). White paper of VMware.
3. A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau. Information and control in gray-box systems. In Proc. SOSP, 2001.
4. P. Barham, B. Dragovic, K. Fraser, S. Hand, T. Harris, A. Ho, R. Neugebauer, I. Pratt, and A. Warfield. Xen and the art of virtualization. In Proc. SOSP, 2003.
5. D. P. Bovet and M. Cesati. Understanding the Linux Kernel. O'Reilly, 3rd edition, 2005.
6. L. Cherkasova, D. Gupta, and A. Vahdat. Comparison of the three CPU schedulers in Xen. SIGMETRICS Perform. Eval. Rev., 35(2):42--51, 2007.
7. L. Cherkasova, D. Gupta, and A. Vahdat. When virtual is harder than real: Resource allocation challenges in virtual machine based it environments. Technical Report HPL-2007-25, February 2007.
8. K. Fraser, S. H, R. Neugebauer, I. Pratt, A. Warfield, and M. Williamson. Safe hardware access with the Xen virtual machine monitor. In Proc. Workshop on OASIS, 2004.
9. T. Garfinkel and M. Rosenblum. When virtual is harder than real: security challenges in virtual machine based computing environments. In Proc. HOTOS, 2005.
10. I. J. Good. Weight of evidence: A brief survey. In Proc. Second Valencia Int'l Meeting on Bayesian Statistics, 1983.
11. S. Govindan, A. R. Nath, A. Das, B. Urgaonkar, and A. Sivasubramaniam. Xen and co.: communication-aware CPU scheduling for consolidated Xen-based hosting platforms. In Proc. VEE, 2007.
12. D. Gupta, L. Cherkasova, R. Gardner, and A. Vahdat. Enforcing performance isolation across virtual machines in Xen. In Proc. ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware Conference, November 2006.
13. S. T. Jones. Implicit operating system awareness in a virtual machine monitor. PhD thesis, Madison, WI, USA, 2007. Adviser-Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau.
14. S. T. Jones, A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau. Antfarm: Tracking processes in a virtual machine environment. In Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2006.
15. S. T. Jones, A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau. Geiger: Monitoring the buffer cache in a virtual machine environment. In Proc. ASPLOS-XII, 2006.
16. S. T. Jones, A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau. VMM-based hidden process detection and identification using Lycosid. In Proc. VEE, 2008.
17. D. Kim, H. Kim, M. Jeon, E. Seo, and J. Lee. Guest-aware priority-based virtual machine scheduling for highly consolidated server. In Proc. Euro-Par, 2008.
18. R. Love. Linux Kernel Development (2nd Edition) (Novell Press). Novell Press, 2nd edition, 2005.
19. M. K. McKusick and G. V. Neville-Neil. Thread scheduling in FreeBSD 5.2. Queue, 2(7):58--64, 2004.
20. D. Ongaro, A. L. Cox, and S. Rixner. Scheduling I/O in virtual machine monitors. In Proc. VEE, 2008.
21. M. E. Russinovich, M. E. Russinovich, D. A. Solomon, and D. A. Solomon. Microsoft Windows Internals, Fourth Edition. Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA, USA, 2004.
22. J. E. Smith. A study of branch prediction strategies. In Proc. ISCA, 1998.

Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software organization and properties

    • Contextual software domains

      • Operating systems

        • Process management

          • Scheduling