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 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 pra...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Jian Wang, Kwame-Lante Wright, Kartik Gopalan
• Keywords: Co-resident Vms, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Guest Vms, HPDC 2008, Network Communications