Coexisting Scheduling Policies Boosting I/O Virtual Machines

Deploying multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) running various types of workloads on current many-core cloud computing infrastructures raises an important issue: The Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) has to efficiently multiplex VM accesses to the hardware. We argue that altering the scheduling concept can optimize the system’s overall performance. Currently, the Xen VMM achieves near native performance multiplexing VMs with homogeneous workloads. Yet having a mixture of VMs with different types of workloads running concurrently, it leads to poor I/O performance. Taking into account the complexity of the design and implementation of a universal scheduler, let alone the probability of being fruitless, we focus on a system with multiple scheduling policies that coexist and service VMs according to their workload characteristics. Thus, VMs can benefit from various schedulers, either existing or new, that are optimal for each specific case. In this paper, we design a framework that provides three basic coexisting scheduling policies and implement it in the Xen paravirtualized environment. Evaluating our prototype we experience 2.3 times faster I/O service and link saturation, while the CPU-intensive VMs achieve more than 80% of current performance.