ColorCom2: A Transparent Co-located Virtual Machine Communication Mechanism

In a virtualized environment, all the resource are managed by a virtual machine monitor (VMM). Virtualization technology creates separate, isolated and secure running environments for operating systems, programs or applications respectively. As the rapid development of hardware, the computing resource becomes abundant, which is a great chance for virtualization to extend its utilization, besides the amount of virtual machines (VMs) built and supported on a solid computing platform also increases rapidly. When a large amount of communication intensive software, such as web service, database center and gateway or domain name server, are deploying on virtualized environment, they have a demand for communicate with each other. For a mature virtual machine monitor, LAN-styled network communication mechanism for co-located virtual machines is a component of necessity. Although this is easy to use and transparent to user space programs and applications, the performance is often not so good to meet this demand because of the isolation barrier brought by the VMM. In this paper, we propose ColorCom2, a transparent co-located virtual machine communication mechanism. It applies directly memory copying and bypasses the traditional split driver model, producing a high performance in co-located virtual machine communication, and it also keeps transparent to upper level programs so any modification of program is not necessary. Also, ColorCom2 has an advantage over some other similar work is that it can work well although in the case that the underlay network device is interrupted. We use benchmarks and common programs to testColorCom2 in Xen hyper visor and the evaluation result have demonstrated that it has an explicit performance boost and a lower resource cost than the in-built co-located virtual machine communication mechanism. Meanwhile, the philosophy behind the design and implementation of ColorCom2 is almost universally applicable in any type of virtual machine.