Performance Analysis of Virtualised Head Nodes Utilising Cost-Effective Network Attached Storage

In modern systems local disk I/O has significantly lower bandwidth than network I/O. This has lead to the development of Storage Area Networks (SANs) often implemented with expensive, high bandwidth switching fabrics. With the development of Infiniband and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching fabrics, high bandwidth I/O is becoming commoditised, but as yet is not cost effective as compared to Gigabit Ethernet solutions. This paper analyses the performance of iSCSI and AoE based network attached storage over multiple Gigabit Ethernet channels. After this analysis we consider I/O performance of a virtual machine accessing storage on the SAN. We show that I/O performance is significantly degraded in a virtual machine to the point that virtualisation should be reserved for CPU-intensive jobs rather than I/O intensive ones.

[1]  Angelos Bilas,et al.  Performance evaluation of commodity iSCSI-based storage systems , 2005, 22nd IEEE / 13th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST'05).

[2]  Dan Zhou,et al.  Performance evaluation of distributed iSCSI RAID , 2003, SNAPI '03.

[3]  David Hung-Chang Du,et al.  Performance study of iSCSI-based storage subsystems , 2003, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[4]  Robert E. Gilligan,et al.  IP SAN - from iSCSI to IP-addressable Ethernet disks , 2003, 20th IEEE/11th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies, 2003. (MSST 2003). Proceedings..

[5]  Vikram A. Saletore,et al.  Evaluating network processing efficiency with processor partitioning and asynchronous I/O , 2006, EuroSys.

[6]  Leon Gommans,et al.  Seamless live migration of virtual machines over the MAN/WAN , 2006, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[7]  Dirk Grunwald,et al.  A performance analysis of the iSCSI protocol , 2003, 20th IEEE/11th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies, 2003. (MSST 2003). Proceedings..