VMDriver: A Driver-Based Monitoring Mechanism for Virtualization

Monitoring virtual machine (VM) is an essential function for virtualized platforms. Existing solutions are either coarse-grained - monitoring in granularity of VM level, or not general - only support specific monitoring functions for particular guest operating system (OS). Thus they do not satisfy the monitoring requirement in large-scale server cluster such as data center and public cloud platform, where each physical platform runs hundreds of VMs with different guest OSes. In this paper, we propose VMDriver, a general and fine-grained approach for virtualization monitoring. The novel design of VMDriver is the separation of event interception point in VMM level and rich guest OS semantic reconstructions in management domain. With this design, variant monitoring drivers in management domain can mask the differences of guest OSes. We implement VMDriver on Xen and our experimental study shows that it introduces very small performance overhead. We demonstrate its generality by inspecting four aspects information about the target virtual machines with different guest OSes. The unified interface of VMDriver brings convenience to develop complex monitoring tools for distributed virtualization environment.