A virtual storage environment for SSDs and HDDs in Xen hypervisor

Abstract

Nowadays, virtualization is a popular technology to provide an abstract hardware emulation due to the increasing hardware speed and capabilities such as multi-core CPUs, large-size main memory, and high-bandwidth networking. Virtualization technology enables multiple virtual machines to run on a physical machine, where each virtual machine can run independently and own its operating system. In particular, I/O performance will be an important factor of virtualization technology. Current popular storage devices contain traditional hard-disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). Although HDDs can provide a more economical solution than SSDs, SSDs can provide high I/O performance and power saving, especially for random I/O accesses. In the paper, we will build a virtual storage environment for SSDs and HDDs in Xen hypervisor. With the proposed virtual storage environment in Xen hypervisor, we can receive and analyze I/O requests from multiple virtual machines, and perform I/O requests to any physical storage devices. According to the experimental results, the proposed method can include both SSDs (i.e., fast access) and HDDs (i.e, low cost) in virtualization environment. Overall, the proposed method can provide an adjustment mechanism in I/O performance for those (soft real-time) applications that require high I/O performance in virtualization environment.