A generic approach for architecture-level performance modeling and prediction of virtualized storage systems

Virtualized environments introduce an additional abstraction layer on top of physical resources to enable the collective resource usage by multiple systems. With the rise of I/O-intensive applications, however, the virtualized storage of such shared environments can quickly become a bottleneck and lead to performance and scalability issues. The latter can be avoided through careful design of the application architecture and systematic capacity planning throughout the system life cycle. In current practice, however, virtualized storage and its performance-influencing design decisions are often neglected or treated as a black-box. In this work-in-progress paper, we propose a generic approach for performance modeling and prediction of virtualized storage systems at the software architecture level. More specifically, we propose two performance modeling approaches of virtualized systems. Furthermore, we propose two approaches how the performance models can be combined with architecture-level performance models. The goal is to cope with the increasing complexity of virtualized storage systems with the benefit of intuitive software architecture-level models.