An Analysis of Performance Interference Effects in Virtual Environments

Virtualization is an essential technology in modern datacenters. Despite advantages such as security isolation, fault isolation, and environment isolation, current virtualization techniques do not provide effective performance isolation between virtual machines (VMs). Specifically, hidden contention for physical resources impacts performance differently in different workload configurations, causing significant variance in observed system throughput. To this end, characterizing workloads that generate performance interference is important in order to maximize overall utility. In this paper, we study the effects of performance interference by looking at system-level workload characteristics. In a physical host, we allocate two VMs, each of which runs a sample application chosen from a wide range of benchmark and real-world workloads. For each combination, we collect performance metrics and runtime characteristics using an instrumented Xen hypervisor. Through subsequent analysis of colle...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISPASS
• Authors: Younggyun Koh, Rob C. Knauerhase, Paul Brett, Mic Bowman, Zhihua Wen, Calton Pu
• Keywords: Effective Performance Isolation, ISPASS 2007, Performance, Performance Interference, Software Engineering