Performance implications of hosting enterprise telephony applications on virtualized multi-core platforms

Virtualization technology has gained significant adoption in various domains as a means to lower costs and enable greener solutions. Recently, there has been a significant amount of interest in employing virtualization technology in the telecommunications domain in order to save costs through server consolidation and to provide energy-efficient solutions. The availability of high-end multi-core servers provides powerful platforms for deployment. However, the telecommunications domain poses unique challenges for virtualization technology to be successfully deployed even in these compute-rich multi-core environments. This work discusses these challenges. It provides a detailed analysis of the performance implications of hosting enterprise IP telephony infrastructure in virtualized environments. Unlike signaling applications that are comparatively more tolerant of underlying platform performance, media applications are far more demanding. Our work, therefore, focuses on the performance of media applications (media server, voice-mail, etc.) in virtualized environments. We develop a model for workloads used in enterprise IP telephony. We then evaluate the impact of various hypervisor scheduler and I/O parameters in order to determine good parameter settings for such workloads. Our experiments use the Xen virtualization platform. The results presented in this work will be useful for telecommunication solution providers to understand the capabilities and limitations of virtual environments when deploying their applications.