Performance Analysis of Network I/O Workloads in Virtualized Data Centers

Server consolidation and application consolidation through virtualization are key performance optimizations in cloud-based service delivery industry. In this paper, we argue that it is important for both cloud consumers and cloud providers to understand the various factors that may have significant impact on the performance of applications running in a virtualized cloud. This paper presents an extensive performance study of network I/O workloads in a virtualized cloud environment. We first show that current implementation of virtual machine monitor (VMM) does not provide sufficient performance isolation to guarantee the effectiveness of resource sharing across multiple virtual machine instances (VMs) running on a single physical host machine, especially when applications running on neighboring VMs are competing for computing and communication resources. Then we study a set of representative workloads in cloud-based data centers, which compete for either CPU or network I/O resources, and present the detailed analysis on different factors that can impact the throughput performance and resource sharing effectiveness. For example, we analyze the cost and the benefit of running idle VM instances on a physical host where some applications are hosted concurrently. We also present an in-depth discussion on the performance impact of colocating applications that compete for either CPU or network I/O resources. Finally, we analyze the impact of different CPU resource scheduling strategies and different workload rates on the performance of applications running on different VMs hosted by the same physical machine.