XenMVM: Exploring potential performance of multi-core system in virtual machine environment

Abstract

In this work, we propose computing resource management system based on Xen VMM and multi-core system, called XenMVM. It adjusts the computing resource dynamically according to the actual workload generated by the applications running in the virtual machine to improve the resource utilization of the computer system. According to the shared L2 cache architecture of multi-core system, we propose the Underlying Layout Aware Scheduling (ULAS) which can schedule the virtual CPUs of virtual machines to the appropriate physical CPUs. The test result shows that ULAS can improve the performance about 4.5%-32.52%. Furthermore, to improve the whole performance of multiple virtual machines and meet the needs of specific jobs (i.e., urgent and I/O intensive) deployed in the virtual machines, a simplified method called Domain-based static priority is adopted in XenMVM. Using case studies we show that our proposal reduces the turnover time of the whole system by 20.45% compared with FCFS scheduling scheme. ©2010 IEEE.