Performance isolation and scheduler behavior

Performance isolation is desirable in virtual machine based infrastructures to meet Service Level Objectives (SLO). In performance isolation, ideally, no virtual machine should affect performance of other co hosted virtual machine. Virtual machine scheduler is the key in allocating resources among virtual machines. This fact attracts attention towards scheduling, as fairness and resource isolation are the key requirements for which any user virtualizes the servers. I/O models are the main bottlenecks in sharing resources among virtual machines. This work aims to evaluate the performance isolation achieved by Xen hypervisor in different scheduler configurations with different kind of resource intensive applications. Experiment results show that isolation is critical when we run I/O application in conjunction with CPU intensive applications.