HYVI: A HYbrid VIrtualization Solution Balancing Performance and Manageability

Virtualization is a building block technology of cloud computing. Software virtualization solutions, such as paravirtualized Memory Management Unit and paravirtualized I/O, provide flexible manageability, such as virtual machine migration and IP-based network packet filtering. However, it suffers from performance and scalability issues. Hardware virtualization and its advanced accelerations, such as Extended Page Table and Single Root I/O Virtualization, were introduced later to simplify virtualization implementation and improve performance. However, this solution may suffer from a manageability issue. In this paper, we describe our work on the implementation of hardware virtualization and optimizations of the advanced hardware acceleration support in Xen to improve the virtualization performance and scalability. We further propose HYVI, a hybrid virtualization solution combining the advantages of software virtualization (manageability) and hardware virtualization (performance and scalability), to address performance and manageability issues. Finally, we present performance evaluations and characterizations of these hardware accelerations and hybrid virtualization, using both OS benchmarks and a server consolidation benchmark (vConsolidate). The results show that optimized hardware acceleration can achieve an up to 77 percent and 33 percent performance improvement over software full virtualization and paravirtualization in the server consolidation benchmark, respectively. Hybrid virtualization achieves an up to 1.56 × performance, with 0.69 lower CPU core usage of paravirtualization, and maintains flexible manageability.