vSlicer: latency-aware virtual machine scheduling via differentiated-frequency CPU slicing

Recent advances in virtualization technologies have made it feasible to host multiple virtual machines (VMs) in the same physical host and even the same CPU core, with fair share of the physical resources among the VMs. However, as more VMs share the same core/CPU, the CPU access latency experienced by each VM increases substantially, which translates into longer I/O processing latency perceived by I/Obound applications. To mitigate such impact while retaining the benefit of CPU sharing, we introduce a new class of VMs called latency-sensitive VMs (LSVMs), which achieve better performance for I/O-bound applications while maintaining the same resource share (and thus cost) as other CPUsharing VMs. LSVMs are enabled by vSlicer, a hypervisorlevel technique that schedules each LSVM more frequently but with a smaller micro time slice. vSlicer enables more timely processing of I/O events by LSVMs, without violating the CPU share fairness among all sharing VMs. Our evaluation of a vSlicer p...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Cong Xu, Sahan Gamage, Pawan N. Rao, Ardalan Kangarlou, Ramana Rao Kompella, Dongyan Xu
• Keywords: Apache Web Server, Benchmark Programs, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Execution Times, HPDC 2012