Diagnosing performance overheads in the xen virtual machine environment

Virtual Machine (VM) environments (e.g., VMware and Xen) are experiencing a resurgence of interest for diverse uses including server consolidation and shared hosting. An application’s performance in a virtual machine environment can differ markedly from its performance in a nonvirtualized environment because of interactions with the underlying virtual machine monitor and other virtual machines. However, few tools are currently available to help debug performance problems in virtual machine environments. In this paper, we present Xenoprof, a system-wide statistical profiling toolkit implemented for the Xen virtual machine environment. The toolkit enables coordinated profiling of multiple VMs in a system to obtain the distribution of hardware events such as clock cycles and cache and TLB misses. We use our toolkit to analyze performance overheads incurred by networking applications running in Xen VMs. We focus on networking applications since virtualizing network I/O devices is rel...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: VEE
• Authors: Aravind Menon, Jose Renato Santos, Yoshio Turner, G. John Janakiraman, Willy Zwaenepoel
• Keywords: VEE 2005, Virtual Machine, Virtual Machine Environment, Virtualization, Xen Virtual Machine