I/O Scheduling by Using Multi-network Interfaces of Virtualization System

Abstract

With the development of virtualization technology, it can run more and more guest domains on one single physical machine. So the network I/O demand is also rapidly increasing, for these guest domains can supply more and more services or run more and more applications. This will lead to serious contention on network I/O of physical machine. Although we can use high performance NICs (network interface cards) to improve network I/O performance, one single NIC cannot get further performance improvement which depends on hardware technology. Linux bonding can achieve high bandwidth network by using multiple NICs, but it does not guarantee QoS among guest domains. Also it would terminate one guest domain's communication because of its response mechanism of ARP. Therefore, we present an approach named Virtual Bonding to achieve high bandwidth network by using multi-NICs. It aggregates multi-NICs to provide high bandwidth and high-quality network services. It also introduces load balancing mechanism between multi-NICs. So it can make full use of every NIC. Furthermore, it makes perfect support to virtualization environment.