vSIP: virtual scheduler for interactive performance

Abstract

This paper presents vSIP, a new scheme of virtual desktop disk scheduling on sharing storage system for user-interactive performance. The proposed scheme enables requests to be dynamically prioritized based on the interactive feature of applications sending them. To enhance user experience on consolidated desktops, our scheme provides interactive applications with priority requests, which have less latency in accessing storage than requests from non-interactive applications sharing the same storage. To this end, we devise a hypervisor extension that classifies interactive applications from non-interactive applications. Our framework prioritizes the requests from these applications and limits the requests rate. Our evaluation shows that the proposed scheme significantly improves interactive performance of storage-sensitive application such as applications launch, Web page loading and video cold playback, when other storage-intensive applications highly disturb the interactive applications. In addition, we introduce a guest OS information transfer method, hence the efficiency and accuracy of the identification of interactive applications can be further improved.