Architecting Flash-based Solid-State Drive for High-performance I/O Virtualization

Abstract

Flash-based solid-state drive (SSD) is now being widely deployed in cloud computing platforms due to the potential advantages of better performance and less energy consumption. However, current virtualization architecture lacks support for highperformance I/O virtualization over persistent storage, which results in sub-optimal I/O performance for guest virtual machines (VMs) on SSD. Further, current software-based I/O virtualization violates the “don't hide power” principle due to inefficient support for some advanced SSD commands (e.g., TRIM) and constrained parallelism, leading to sub-optimal performance and life cycle.