Performance evaluation of video-on-demand in virtualized environments: the client perspective

Abstract

Virtualization is a key technology for data centres to implement infrastructure as a service as well as to achieve server consolidation and application colocation. Over the years performance of virtual machine (VM) monitors have improved [8]. Thus, new services are being migrated to these environments. Latency sensitive applications however, are not considered fit for Virtual environments due to high virtualization overhead and potential interference from other VMs. In this paper, we performed measurement-based analysis of the performance impact on VOD server in presence of I/O bound workloads in co-located virtual machines. The focus of our study is on the QOS (quality of service) received by clients; metrics of delay, jitter, packet loss are examined. As expected, the performance of VOD server in a VM suffers severe degradation in presence of heavy disk-I/O bound and outbound network UDP co-located workloads.