VM-aware Flush Mechanism for Mitigating Inter-VM I/O Interference
Taehyung Leea, Minho Leeb and Young Ik Eomc
Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
ataehyunggg@skku.edu
bminhozx@skku.edu
cyieom@skku.edu
ABSTRACT
Consolidating multiple servers into a physical machine is now commonplace in cloud infrastructures. The virtualized systems often arrange virtual disks of multiple virtual machines (VMs) on the same underlying storage device while striving to guarantee the performance service level objective (SLO) for each VM. Unfortunately, sync operations called by a VM make it hard to satisfy the performance SLO by disturbing I/O activities of other VMs. We reveal that the disk cache flush command is a root cause of this problem and present a novel VM-aware flush mechanism, called vFLUSH, which supports the VM-based persistency control of the disk cache flush command. Our evaluation shows that vFLUSH reduces the average latency of disk cache flush commands by up to 52.0% and improves the overall I/O performance by up to 59.6% on real workloads.
