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Performance implications of hosting enterprise telephony applications on virtualized multi-core platforms

Published: 07 July 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Virtualization technology has gained significant adoption in various domains as a means to lower costs and enable greener solutions. Recently, there has been a significant amount of interest in employing virtualization technology in the telecommunications domain in order to save costs through server consolidation and to provide energy-efficient solutions. The availability of high-end multi-core servers provides powerful platforms for deployment. However, the telecommunications domain poses unique challenges for virtualization technology to be successfully deployed even in these compute-rich multi-core environments. This work discusses these challenges. It provides a detailed analysis of the performance implications of hosting enterprise IP telephony infrastructure in virtualized environments. Unlike signaling applications that are comparatively more tolerant of underlying platform performance, media applications are far more demanding. Our work, therefore, focuses on the performance of media applications (media server, voice-mail, etc.) in virtualized environments. We develop a model for workloads used in enterprise IP telephony. We then evaluate the impact of various hypervisor scheduler and I/O parameters in order to determine good parameter settings for such workloads. Our experiments use the Xen virtualization platform. The results presented in this work will be useful for telecommunication solution providers to understand the capabilities and limitations of virtual environments when deploying their applications.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IPTComm '09: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Principles, Systems and Applications of IP Telecommunications
July 2009
140 pages
ISBN:9781605587677
DOI:10.1145/1595637
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 July 2009

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Author Tags

  1. Xen
  2. enterprise telephony workloads
  3. server consolidation
  4. virtualization
  5. virtualization overheads

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Overall Acceptance Rate 18 of 62 submissions, 29%

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  • (2016)PorisIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2015.241028027:3(841-854)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
  • (2014)Evaluating industrial applicability of virtualization on a distributed multicore platformProceedings of the 2014 IEEE Emerging Technology and Factory Automation (ETFA)10.1109/ETFA.2014.7005062(1-8)Online publication date: Sep-2014
  • (2013)Supporting parallel soft real-time applications in virtualized environmentProceedings of the 22nd international symposium on High-performance parallel and distributed computing10.1145/2493123.2462926(117-118)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2013
  • (2013)Supporting parallel soft real-time applications in virtualized environmentProceedings of the 22nd international symposium on High-performance parallel and distributed computing10.1145/2462902.2462926(117-118)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2013
  • (2013)Virtual Machine Scheduling for Parallel Soft Real-Time ApplicationsProceedings of the 2013 IEEE 21st International Symposium on Modelling, Analysis & Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems10.1109/MASCOTS.2013.74(525-534)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2013
  • (2013)Cache isolation for virtualization of mixed general-purpose and real-time systemsJournal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal10.1016/j.sysarc.2013.07.00459:10(1405-1413)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2013
  • (2012)vSlicerProceedings of the 21st international symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing10.1145/2287076.2287080(3-14)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2012
  • (2012)MORPHOSYSProceedings of the 2012 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (ccgrid 2012)10.1109/CCGrid.2012.44(90-97)Online publication date: 13-May-2012
  • (2012)Scalable and Elastic Telecommunication Services in the CloudBell Labs Technical Journal10.1002/bltj.2154617:2(81-96)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2012
  • (2011)Towards real-time scheduling of virtual machines without kernel modificationsETFA201110.1109/ETFA.2011.6059185(1-4)Online publication date: Sep-2011
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