Adaptive I/O Bandwidth Allocation for Virtualization Environment on Xen Platform

Abstract

Virtual machines frequently have various demands of storage I/O and priority. They are desired to operated several services simultaneously in the same system. However, we cannot assure that some virtual machine which required higher I/O bandwidth will gain proper resources. Moreover, existing fair queueing I/O schedulers cannot provide efficient disk resource allocation, which often leads to bottlenecks at a storage level. To solve the upper described problems, we propose AIO, an Adaptive I/O Bandwidth Allocation for Virtualization Environment on Xen platform. We designed AIO by adopted the concept of the traffic policing and shaping to support the bandwidth sharing between virtual machines and ensuring the Quality of Service of disk I/O resource. This framework allows us to allocate disk I/O bandwidth among the groups of virtual domains dynamically according to configuration rate and priority of particular resource classes. Experiments results show that AIO is useful in maintaining the disk I/O bandwidth of the virtual domain and slightly improves the I/O performance of the system.