Performance Measurements and Analysis of Network I/O Applications in Virtualized Cloud

Virtualization is a key technology for cloud based data centers to implement the vision of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and to promote effective server consolidation and application consolidation. However, current implementation of virtual machine monitor does not provide sufficient performance isolation to guarantee the effectiveness of resource sharing, especially when the applications running on multiple virtual machines of the same physical machine are competing for computing and communication sources. In this paper, we present our performance measurement study of network I/O applications in virtualized cloud. We focus our measurement based analysis on performance impact of co-locating applications in a virtualized cloud in terms of throughput and resource sharing effectiveness, including the impact of idle instances on applications that are running concurrently on the same physical host. Our results show that by strategically co-locating network I/O applications, performance improvement for cloud consumers can be as high as 34%, and the cloud providers can achieve over 40% performance gain.