2012 Linux Symposium Publications
VMware engineers Alex Depoutovitch, Andrei Warkentin, and Hariharan Subramanian had papers accepted to the Linux symposium. You can read the abstracts here, or download the full documents via the links below.
Posts tagged storage
vIC: Interrupt Coalescing for Virtual Machine Storage Device IO
Interrupt coalescing is a well known and proven technique for reducing CPU utilization when processing high IO rates in network and storage controllers. Virtualization introduces a layer of virtual hardware for the guest operating system, whose interrupt rate can be controlled by the hypervisor. Unfortunately, existing techniques based…
Exertion-based Billing for Cloud Storage Access
This paper argues for exertion-based metrics, such as disk time, for the access cost component of cloud storage billing. It also discusses challenges in supporting fair and predictable exertion accounting, such as significant inter-workload interference effects for storage access, and a performance insulation approach to addressing them.
An Analysis of Disk Performance in VMware ESX Virtual Machines
VMware ESX Server is a software platform that efficiently multiplexes the hardware resources of a server among virtual machines. This paper studies the performance of a key component of the ESX Server architecture: its storage subsystem. We characterize the performance of native systems and virtual machines using a…
Towards Distributed Storage Resource Management using Flow Control
Deployment of shared storage systems is increasing with rapid adoption of virtualization technologies to provide isolation, better management and high utilization of resources. Quality of service (QoS) in such environments is quite desirable for meeting IO demands of virtual machines. The lack of QoS support at typical storage…
PARDA: Proportional Allocation of Resources for Distributed Storage Access
Rapid adoption of virtualization technologies has led to increased utilization of physical resources, which are multiplexed among numerous workloads with varying demands and importance. Virtualization has also accelerated the deployment of shared storage systems, which offer many advantages in such environments. Effective resource management for shared storage systems…
Storage Workload Characterization and Consolidation in Virtualized Environments
Server virtualization is accelerating the already existing need for shared storage area network (SAN) infrastructure for the associated benefits of migration, flexible management and economies of sharing. Understanding the characteristics of a workload in terms of access locality, IO sizes, read write ratio etc. is crucial for effective…
Small-File Access in Parallel File Systems
Today’s computational science demands have resulted in ever larger parallel computers, and storage systems have grown to match these demands. Parallel file systems used in this environment are increasingly specialized to extract the highest possible performance for large I/O operations, at the expense of other potential workloads. While…
Decentralized Deduplication in SAN Cluster File Systems
File systems hosting virtual machines typically contain many duplicated blocks of data resulting in wasted storage space and increased storage array cache footprint. Deduplication addresses these problems by storing a single instance of each unique data block and sharing it between all original sources of that data. While…
IOBlazer
IOBlazer is a multi-platform storage stack micro-benchmark. IOBlazer runs on Linux, Windows and OSX and it is capable of generating a highly customizable workload.
