A major obstacle to virtualizing HPC workloads is a concern about the performance loss due to virtualization. We will demonstrate that new features significantly enhance the performance and scalability of virtualized HPC workloads on VMware’s virtualization platform.
Virtual machines are becoming commonplace as a stable and flexible platform to run many workloads. As developers continue to move more workloads into virtual environments, they need ways to analyze the performance characteristics of those workloads.
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…
The following are abstracts from papers presented at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas: A Clean Environment for Web Applications Using Lightweight Virtualization Jiang Wang, Yih Huang, Angelos Stavrou and Anup Ghosh (George Mason University) Internet Cleanroom: A System Using On-Demand Virtualization to Enhance Client-Side Security while Keeping Usability…
In the 1990s, Stanford University researchers began to look at the potential of virtual machines to overcome difficulties that hardware and operating system limitations imposed: This time the problems stemmed from massively parallel processing (MPP) machines that were difficult to program and could not run existing operating systems.…
Paravirtualization has a lot of promise, in particular in its ability to deliver performance by allowing the hypervisor to be aware of the idioms in the operating system. Since kernel changes are necessary, it is very easy to get into a situation where the paravirtualized kernel is incapable…
Until recently, the x86 architecture has not permitted classical trap-and-emulate virtualization. Virtual Machine Monitors for x86, such as VMware Workstation and Virtual PC, have instead used binary translation of the guest kernel code. However, both Intel and AMD have now introduced architectural extensions to support classical virtualization. We…
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…
Virtualization is an important enabling technology for many large private datacenters and cloud computing environments. Virtual machines often have complex expectations of their runtime environment such as access to a particular network segment or storage system. Similarly, the runtime environment may have complex expectations of a virtual machine’s…
Virtualization technology— as applied in embedded devices such as mobile smartphones— is a practical means for the wide- spread deployment of pervasive computing applications. Pervasive computing is all about moving beyond the desktop PC to the computational and digital devices that surround us in our daily lives. The…
Virtualization has been a key technology in enhancing interoperability and in making systems more secure. However, the question remains whether virtualization can be used in the context of real-time systems because of efficiency and schedulability issues. This question is even more controversial when recursive virtualization is considered. In…
For the majority of common workloads, performance in a virtualized environment is close to that in a native environment. Virtualization does create some overheads, however. These come from the virtualization of the CPU, the MMU (Memory Management Unit), and the I/O devices. In some of their recent x86…
