DaSS: Dynamic time slice scheduler for virtual machine monitor

Abstract

I/O performance is an important factor in virtualization technology. However, the hypervisor and the scheduler brings impact on the I/O performance, since the scheduler considers I/O-intensive Virtual Machine (VM) and CPU-intensive VM as the same VM which results in scheduling latency. Most researches address this I/O problem but they do not take dynamic workload into consideration, leaving the facts that their solutions do not work well when the workload is volatile. In this paper, we present a Dynamic time Slice Scheduler (DaSS) as a software solution which brings a significant improvement on the I/O performance. In order to maintain good flexibility and availability, DaSS requires no modification on the Guest OS but only a few changes on the VMM. We implement the prototype on Xen 4. 3. 0 and conduct detailed evaluations on network benchmarks. Our experimental results show that DaSS increases I/O throughput by nearly 40%.