Understanding the implications of virtual machine management on processor microarchitecture design

Abstract

Cloud computing has demonstrated tremendous capability in a wide spectrum of online services. Virtualization provides an efficient solution to the utilization of modern multicore processor systems while affording significant flexibility. The growing popularity of virtualized datacenters motivates deeper understanding of the interactions between virtual machine management and the micro-architecture behaviors of the privileged domain. We argue that these behaviors must be factored into the design of processor microarchitecture in virtualized datacenters. In this work, we use performance counters on modern servers to study the micro-architectural execution characteristics of the privileged domain while performing various VM management operations. Our study shows that today's state-of-the-art processor still has room for further optimizations when executing virtualized cloud workloads, particularly in the organization of last level caches and on-chip cache coherence protocol. Specifically, our analysis shows that: shared caches could be partitioned to eliminate interference between the privileged domain and guest domains; the cache coherence protocol could support a high degree of data sharing of the privileged domain; and cache capacity or CPU utilization occupied by the privileged domain could be effectively managed when performing management workflows to achieve high system throughput.