Modeling VDI Application with Guaranteed Quality of Service

As the rapid development of virtualization technology, traditional data centers are gradually superseding physical machines with virtual machines (VMs) to provide services. Virtual machines hosting different applications (e.g. database server, mail server) run on the same physical host. Apart from improving hardware utilization, virtualization enables migrating applications seamlessly to a different physical host for the purpose of load balancing, planned software/hardware upgrades, etc. To avoid migrating data along with the in memory state of the virtual machines, virtual machine data is stored on shared storage. This enables a virtual machine, irrespective of the physical machine it is hosted on, to access its data over the network from the storage system. Since in the shared storage architecture, multiple VMs/applications will compete with each other for IO resources and capacity resources of the storage system, it is essential to provide minimum guarantees of quality of service (QoS) for VMs.