Streaming as a hypervisor service

Abstract

Interference from resource sharing can cause unpredictable performance when virtual machines are consolidated on a single machine. We demonstrate performance problems with HTTP streaming in a virtual machine environment, even when no other virtual machines compete for network bandwidth. The paper suggests and evaluates a novel in-hypervisor data streaming service as a remedy to the performance problem. By modifying a Linux guest to exploit this new hypervisor interface, significant performance gains are experienced from a hosted Apache HTTP server.