Abstract
Virtualization enables the consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) to increase the utilization of physical servers in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud providers. However, our experience shows that storage I/O performance varies wildly in the face of consolidation. Since many users may desire consistent performance, we argue that IaaS providers should offer a class of predictable-performance service in addition to existing (predictability- oblivious) services. Thus, we propose VirtualFence, a storage system that provides predictable VM performance. VirtualFence uses three main techniques: (1) non-work-conserving time-division I/O scheduling, (2) a small solid-state (SSD) cache in front of a much larger hard disk drive (HDD), and (3) space-partitioning of both the SSD cache and the HDD. Our evaluation shows that VirtualFence improves predictability significantly, while allowing cloud providers to reach any desired compromise between predictability and performance.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 6550269 |
| Pages (from-to) | 93-98 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Service, IWQoS |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2013 |
| Event | 2013 IEEE/ACM 21st International Symposium on Quality of Service, IWQoS 2013 - Montreal, QC, Canada Duration: Jun 3 2013 → Jun 4 2013 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering