Abstract

This paper introduces a novel algorithm for IO resource allocation in a hypervisor. Our algorithm, mClock, supports proportional-share fairness subject to minimum reservations and maximum limits on the IO allocations for VMs. We present the design of mClock and a prototype implementation inside the VMware ESX server hypervisor. Our results indicate that these rich QoS controls are quite effective in isolating VM performance and providing better application latency. We also show an adaptation of mClock (called dmClock) for a distributed storage environment, where storage is jointly provided by multiple nodes.

Authors

Ajay Gulati, Arif Merchant, Peter J. Varman