FIOS: a flexible virtualized I/O subsystem to alleviate interference among virtual machines

Serving as the infrastructure of cloud computing, virtualization technologies have attracted considerable interest in recent years for their excellent resource utility, scalability, and high availability. Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), which is a key element in cloud computing, enables multiple guest operating systems running simultaneously to share the same physical resources. This may lead to significant interference of disk I/O performance among virtual machines (VM). Particularly, the I/O performance of none I/O intensive domains can be seriously injured by the advent of I/O intensive nodes. We address this problem by building a block-level cache in the virtualized layer to absorb I/O requests from different domains. This method not only effectively alleviates the I/O performance interference caused by I/O intensive domains, but also greatly improves the I/O performance of guest OS. We implement and evaluate a Flexible I/O Subsystem (FIOS) within Xen VMM and show an evident reduction of I/O performance interference among virtual machines as well as a remarkable improvement of disk throughput.

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