Research Article
A Fast and Transparent Communication Protocol for Co-Resident Virtual Machines
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/icst.collaboratecom.2012.250405, author={Yi Ren and Ling Liu and Xiaojian Liu and Jinzhu Kong and Huadong Dai and Qingbo Wu and Yuan Li}, title={A Fast and Transparent Communication Protocol for Co-Resident Virtual Machines}, proceedings={8th IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing}, publisher={IEEE}, proceedings_a={COLLABORATECOM}, year={2012}, month={12}, keywords={inter-vm communication shared memory high performance programming transparency kernel transparency live migration support}, doi={10.4108/icst.collaboratecom.2012.250405} }- Yi Ren
Ling Liu
Xiaojian Liu
Jinzhu Kong
Huadong Dai
Qingbo Wu
Yuan Li
Year: 2012
A Fast and Transparent Communication Protocol for Co-Resident Virtual Machines
COLLABORATECOM
ICST
DOI: 10.4108/icst.collaboratecom.2012.250405
Abstract
Network I/O workloads are dominating in most of the Cloud datacenters today. One way to improve inter-VM communication efficiency is to support co-resident VM communication using a faster communication protocol than the traditional TCP/IP commonly used regardless whether VMs are located on the same physical host or not. Most state of the art shared memory based approaches focus on performance, with programming transparency and live migration support considered. However, few of them provides performance, live migration support, user-kernel-hypervisor transparency at the same time. In this paper, we classify existing methods into three categories by their implementation layer: 1) user libraries and system calls layer, 2) below socket layer and above transport layer, 3) below IP layer. We argye that the choice of implementation layer has significant impact on both transparency and performance, even for live migration support. We present our design and implementation of XenVMC, a fast and transparent residency-aware inter-VM communication protocol with VM live migratoin support，which is implemented in layer 2. It supports live migration via automatic co-resident VM detection and transparent system call interception mechanisms, with multilevel transparency guaranteed. Our initial experiments show that compared with virtualized TCP/IP method, XenVMC improves co-resident VM communication throughput by up to a factor of 9 and reduces corresponding latency by up to a factor of 6.