Synergy: A Hypervisor Managed Holistic Caching System

Efficient system-wide memory management is an important challenge for over-commitment based hosting in virtualized systems. Due to the limitation of memory domains considered for sharing, current deduplication solutions simply cannot achieve system-wide deduplication. Popular memory management techniques like sharing and ballooning enable important memory usage optimizations individually. However, they do not complement each other and, in fact, may degrade individual benefits when combined. We propose Synergy, a hypervisor managed caching system to improve memory efficiency in over-commitment scenarios. Synergy builds on an exclusive caching framework to achieve, for the first time, system-wide memory deduplication. Synergy also enables the co-existence of the mutually agnostic ballooning and sharing techniques within hypervisor managed systems. Finally, Synergy implements a novel file-level eviction policy that prevents hypervisor caching benefits from being squandered away due to partial cache hits. Synergy’s cache is flexible with configuration knobs for cache sizing and data storage options, and a utility-based cache partitioning scheme. Our evaluation shows that Synergy consistently uses 10% to 75% lesser memory by exploiting system-wide deduplication as compared to inclusive caching techniques and achieves application speedup of 2x to 23x. We also demonstrate the capabilities of Synergy to increase VM packing density and support for dynamic reconfiguration of cache partitioning policies.