On the Cost of Measuring Traffic in a Virtualized Environment

The current trend in application development and deployment is to package applications and services within containers or virtual machines. This results in a blend of virtual and physical resources with complex network interconnection schemas mixing virtual and physical switches along with specific protocols to build virtual networks spanning over several servers. While the complexity of this set-up is hidden by private/public cloud management solutions, e.g. OpenStack, this new environment constitutes a challenge when it comes to monitor and debug performance related issues. In this paper, we introduce the problem of measuring traffic in a virtualized environment and focus on one typical scenario, namely virtual machines interconnected with a virtual switch. For this scenario, we assess the cost of continuously measuring the network traffic activity of the machines. Specifically, we seek to estimate the competition that exists to access the physical resources (e.g., CPU) of the physical server between the measurement task and the legacy application activity.