Dynamic Co-located VM Detection and Membership Update for Residency Aware Inter-VM Communication in Virtualized Clouds

Abstract

Inter-VM traffics are witnessed as one of the dominating costs for massive parallel computation jobs in virtualized clouds nowadays. One way to improve the efficiency is to exploit shared memory facilities provided by the hypervisor or the host domain to bypass traditional network path for co-located VMs. Thus it is important to be capable of determining whether two VMs are co-located on the same physical node or not. Existing approaches employ either static or dynamic method to maintain co-located VM membership. Since static methods are not adaptive to support runtime detection of VM existence changes, polling based dynamic methods are adopted, with which the response time to membership change is hold up by pre-configured polling cycle. Moreover, the overhead for the membership change and the scalability over the number of co-located VMs are not considered. In this paper, we propose CoKeeper, a dynamic event driven co-located VM detection and membership update approach for residency aware inter-VM communication. CoKeeper responses faster than polling based methods since the membership updates are immediately visible after the events of VM existence changes. Experimental results show that the response time of CoKeeper is more than 10 times lower than that of polling based method and more stable. It achieves lower CPU and network overhead as well as co-located VM scalability. With real network intensive application workloads, we validate that CoKeeper can ensure user level and Linux kernel transparency even in cases of dynamic VM existence changes.