Performance Evaluation of the CPU Scheduler in XEN

Virtual machines with advances in software and architectural support have emerged as the basis for enterprises to allocate resources recently. One main benefit of virtual machine is server consolidation. However, flexible and complex consolidation results in some unpredictable performance problems and introduces new requirements, such as proper configurations for scheduler and reasonable arrangements for services. In this paper, we present a comparative performance evaluation of several different typical application consolidations in different configurations of scheduler parameters (under Credit scheduler) in Xen. We analyze the impact of the configurations of scheduler and mutual impact between VMs which run different types of applications, present proposals for users to adopt an efficient scheduler configuration in applying virtualization, and offer insight into the relationship of performance and scheduler parameters to motivate future innovation in virtualization.