skip to main content
10.1145/2522548.2522598acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescomputeConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Empirical study of performance benefits of hardware assisted virtualization

Published: 22 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

An application's performance can suffer from significant computational overheads when it is moved from a native to a virtualized environment. Adoption of virtualization without understanding such overheads in detail can dramatically impact the overall performance of hosted applications. The rapid adoption of virtualization has fueled the development of new hardware technologies, which promise to optimize the performance and scalability of processor and network I/O virtualization. However, no comprehensive empirical study of the effectiveness of these hardware assistance technologies is publicly available. In this paper we focus on x86 architectures and study empirically the performance improvements introduced by Intel's VT and PCI-SIG's SR-IOV on a Xen-based hypervisor. Using a range of benchmark programs, we compare benchmark scores and resource utilization between native and virtual environments for two different testbeds, one with hardware assistance and one without. The results indicate that hardware assistance indeed eliminates most overheads, especially those relating to network I/O, but non-negligible CPU overheads still remain. Also, there is no hardware technology with specifically deals with disk I/O virtualization, and significant overheads do arise in workloads requiring intensive disk usage.

References

[1]
Migrating Virtual Machines, http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/esxi-and-esx/index.html, VMware Inc.
[2]
P. Barhaml, B. Dragovic, K. Fraser, S. Hand, T. Harris, A. Ho, R. Neugebauer, I. Pratt, and A. Warfield, "Xen and the art of virtualization," in Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2003, pp. 164--177.
[3]
J. N. Matthews, W. Hu, M. Hapuarachchi, T. Deshane, D. Dimatos, G. Hamilton, M. McCabe, and J. Owens, "Quantifying the performance isolation properties of virtualization systems," in Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Experimental computer science, 2007.
[4]
K. L. Kroeker, "The Evolution of Virtualization," Communications of ACM, vol. 52, no. 3, pp. 18--20, 2009.
[5]
U. F. Minhas, J. Yadav, A. Aboulnaga, and K. Salem, "Database Systems on Virtual Machines: How Much do You Lose?" in International Workshop on Self-Managing Database Systems, 2008, pp. 35--41.
[6]
P. Apparao, R. Iyer, and D. Newell, "Towards Modeling and Analysis of Consolidated CMP Servers," ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 38--45, 2008.
[7]
K. Adams and O. Agesen, "A comparison of software and hardware techniques for x86 virtualization," in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, 2006, pp. 2--13.
[8]
T. Wood, L. Cherkasova, K. Ozonat, and P. Shenoy, "Predicting application resource requirements in virtual environments," in Middleware'08: 9th International Middleware Conference, 2008.
[9]
G. Jung, K. R. Joshi, M. A. Hiltunen, R. D. Schlichting, and C. Pu, "Generating adaptation policies for multi-tier applications in consolidated server environments," in International Conference on Autonomic Computing, 2008.
[10]
R. Uhlig, G. Neiger, D. Rodgers, A. L. Santoni, F. C. Martins, A. V. Anderson, S. M. Bennett, A. Kãd'gi, F. H. Leung, and L. Smith, "Intel Virtualization Technology," IEEE Computer, May 2005.
[11]
Y. Dong, Z. Yu, and G. Rose, "SR-IOV Networking in Xen: Architecture, Design and Implementation," in First Workshop on I/O Virtualization. USENIX Association, December 2008.
[12]
J. Sonnek and A. Chandra, "Virtual putty: Reshaping the physical footprint of virtual machines," in HotCloud Workshop, 2009.
[13]
G. Dasgupta, A. Sharma, A. Verma, A. Neogi, and R. Kothari, "Workload Management for Power Efficiency in Virtualized Data Centers," Communications of ACM, 2011.
[14]
"SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation," http://www.spec.org/.
[15]
"TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council," http://www.tpc.org.
[16]
T. Farwell, "It's All Relative," IBM Systems Magazine, June 2005.
[17]
VMware Inc., "VMware VMmark 2.x," http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/overview.html.
[18]
E. Hoover, "It's a Grand Slam," IBM Systems Magazine, April 2005.
[19]
C. Waldspurger and M. Rosenblum, "I/O Virtualization," Communications of ACM, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 66--72, 2012.
[20]
Advanced Micro Devices Inc., "AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) Technology," http://sites.amd.com/us/business/it-solutions/virtualization/Pages/virtualization.aspx#2.
[21]
"Byte-unixbench - A Unix benchmark suite," http://code.google.com/p/byte-unixbench/.
[22]
National Laboratory for Applied Network Research, "Iperf," http://iperf.sourceforge.net/.
[23]
National Library of Medicine, "BLAST: Basic Local Alignment Search Tool," http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi.
[24]
"RUBiS: Rice University Bidding System," http://rubis.ow2.org/.
[25]
E. D. Lazowska, J. Zahorjan, G. S. Graham, and K. C. Sevcik, Quantitative System Performance: Computer System Analysis Using Queueing Network Models. Prentice-Hall Inc.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)PDIFT++: System-Wide Memory Tracking Using a Single-Process Memory TrackerSN Computer Science10.1007/s42979-023-02555-w5:2Online publication date: 20-Jan-2024
  • (2020)Analysis, Evaluation, and Assessment for Containerizing an Industry Automation Software2020 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)10.1109/SMC42975.2020.9282840(1972-1979)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2020
  • (2019)Virtual machine consolidation: a systematic review of its overhead influencing factorsThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-019-03025-yOnline publication date: 22-Oct-2019
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Empirical study of performance benefits of hardware assisted virtualization

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    Compute '13: Proceedings of the 6th ACM India Computing Convention
    August 2013
    196 pages
    ISBN:9781450325455
    DOI:10.1145/2522548
    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]

    In-Cooperation

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 22 August 2013

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. SR-IOV
    2. benchmarking
    3. hardware assistance
    4. performance overhead
    5. virtualization

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    Compute '13
    Compute '13: The 6th ACM India Computing Convention
    August 22 - 25, 2013
    Tamil Nadu, Vellore, India

    Acceptance Rates

    Compute '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 96 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 114 of 622 submissions, 18%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)7
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 16 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)PDIFT++: System-Wide Memory Tracking Using a Single-Process Memory TrackerSN Computer Science10.1007/s42979-023-02555-w5:2Online publication date: 20-Jan-2024
    • (2020)Analysis, Evaluation, and Assessment for Containerizing an Industry Automation Software2020 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)10.1109/SMC42975.2020.9282840(1972-1979)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2020
    • (2019)Virtual machine consolidation: a systematic review of its overhead influencing factorsThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-019-03025-yOnline publication date: 22-Oct-2019
    • (2015)Virtual machine migration in cloud data centersThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-015-1400-571:7(2473-2515)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2015
    • (2014)A flexible interface architecture for reconfigurable coprocessors in embedded multicore systems using PCIe Single-root I/O virtualization2014 International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (FPT)10.1109/FPT.2014.7082780(223-226)Online publication date: Dec-2014

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media