Xen | EPFL Graph Search

Xen est un logiciel libre de virtualisation, plus précisément un hyperviseur de machine virtuelle, de type 1. Son développement a débuté sous la forme d'un projet de recherche de l'université de Cambridge au Royaume-Uni. La société XenSource a par la suite été créée et en a poursuivi le développement. Xen permet de faire fonctionner plusieurs systèmes d'exploitation virtuels (invités) sur une seule machine hôte. Xen est en partie intégré à la partie principale du noyau linux depuis la version 3.0. Présentation Xen permet d'exécuter plusieurs systèmes d'exploitation (et leurs applications) de manière isolée sur une même machine physique sur plate-forme x86, x86-64, IA-64 et PowerPC, ARM Cortex-A7 et Cortex-A15 (bientôt sur SPARC). Les systèmes d'exploitation invités partagent ainsi les ressources de la machine hôte. Xen est un « paravirtualiseur » ou un « hyperviseur » de machines virtuelles. Les systèmes d'exploitation invités ont « conscience » du Xen sous-jacent, ils o

Optimizing network performance in virtual machines

Aravind Menon

In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in the adoption of virtual machine technology in data centers and cluster environments. This trend towards server virtualization is driven by two main factors: the savings in hardware cost that can be achieved through the use of virtualization, and the increased flexibility in the management of hardware resources in a cluster environment. An important consequence of server virtualization is the negative impact it has on the networking performance of server applications running in virtual machines (VMs). In this thesis, we address the problem of efficiently virtualizing the network interface in Type-II virtual machine monitors. In the Type-II architecture, the VMM relies on a special, 'host' operating system to provide the device drivers to access I/O devices, and executes the drivers within the host operating system. Using the Xen VMM as an example of this architecture, we identify fundamental performance bottlenecks in the network virtualization architecture of Type-II VMMs. We show that locating the device drivers in a separate host VM is the primary reason for performance degradation in Type-II VMMs, because of two reasons: a) the switching between the guest and the host VM for device driver invocation, and, b) I/O virtualization operations required to transfer packets between the guest and the host address spaces. We present a detailed analysis of the virtualization overheads in the Type-II I/O architecture, and we present three solutions which explore the performance that can be achieved while performing network virtualization at three different levels: in the host OS, in the VMM, and in the NIC hardware. Our first solution consists of a set of packet aggregation optimizations that explores the performance achievable while retaining the Type-II I/O architecture in the Xen VMM. This solution retains the core functionality of I/O virtualization, including device driver execution, in the Xen 'driver domain'. With this set of optimizations, we achieve an improvement by a factor of two to four in the networking performance of Xen guest domains. In our second solution, we move the task of I/O virtualization and device driver execution from the host OS to the Xen hypervisor. We propose a new I/O virtualization architecture, called the TwinDrivers framework, which combines the performance advantages of Type-I VMMs with the safety and software engineering benefits of Type-II VMMs. (In a Type-I VMM, the device driver executes directly in the hypervisor, and gives much better performance than a Type-II VMM). The TwinDrivers architecture results in another factor of two improvements in networking performance for Xen guest domains. Finally, in our third solution, we describe a hardware based approach to network virtualization, in which we move the task of network virtualization into the network interface card (NIC). We develop a specialized network interface (CDNA) which allows guest operating systems running in VMs to directly access a private, virtual context on the NIC for network I/O, bypassing the host OS entirely. This approach also yields performance benefits similar to the TwinDrivers software-only approach. Overall, our solutions help significantly bridge the gap between the network performance in a virtualized environment and a native environment, eventually achieving network performance in a virtual machine within 70% of the native performance.

EPFL2009

Diagnosing Performance Overheads in the Xen Virtual Machine Environment

Aravind Menon, Willy Zwaenepoel

Virtual Machine (VM) environments (e.g., VMware and Xen) are experiencing a resurgence of interest for diverse uses including server consolidation and shared hosting. An application's performance in a virtual machine environ- ment can differ markedly from its performance in a non- virtualized environment because of interactions with the underlying virtual machine monitor and other virtual ma- chines. However, few tools are currently available to help de- bug performance problems in virtual machine environments. In this paper, we present Xenoprof, a system-wide statis- tical profiling toolkit implemented for the Xen virtual ma- chine environment. The toolkit enables coordinated profil- ing of multiple VMs in a system to obtain the distribution of hardware events such as clock cycles and cache and TLB misses. We use our toolkit to analyze performance overheads in- curred by networking applications running in Xen VMs. We focus on networking applications since virtualizing network I/O devices is relatively expensive. Our experimental re- sults quantify Xen's performance overheads for network I/O device virtualization in uni- and multi-processor systems. Our results identify the main sources of this overhead which should be the focus of Xen optimization efforts. We also show how our profiling toolkit was used to uncover and re- solve performance bugs that we encountered in our experi- ments which caused unexpected application behavior.

2005

Optimizing network performance in virtual machines

Aravind Menon

EPFL2009