VITS Test Suit: A Micro-benchmark for Evaluating Performance Isolation of Virtualization Systems

Abstract

Virtualization technology improves the resource utilization, but also raises the probability of resource contention. Thus, it arises one problem, namely how about performance isolation among VMs. To answer the question, benchmarks are highly required to evaluate performance isolation. However, few benchmarks to give solutions to the problem are available. Especially, there does not exist a micro-benchmark to measure how the performance of individual primitive operations varies with the type of misbehavior. In the paper, we present VITS - a micro-benchmark to evaluate the performance isolation of virtualization system. VITS Test Suite can test both software and hardware performance isolation. It is mainly consisted of six interference programs, which respectively test the performance isolation of cache, memory bandwidth, memory space, CPU, network and disk. VITS Test Suite provides results for user to analyze the performance isolation problem of the virtualization system along with the underlying hardware. Besides, we test Xen using VITS test suit. The experimental results show that, the cache, memory and disk performance isolation still have some big weak points to improve, in other words, the current virtualization system Xen is still unfair in fine-grained resource share.