Improving virtualization performance and scalability with advanced hardware accelerations

Many advanced hardware accelerations for virtualization, such as Pause Loop Exit (PLE), Extended Page Table (EPT), and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), have been introduced recently to improve the virtualization performance and scalability. In this paper, we share our experience with the performance and scalability issues of virtualization, especially those brought by the modern, multi-core and/or overcommitted systems. We then describe our work on the implementation and optimizations of the advanced hardware acceleration support in the latest version of Xen. Finally, we present performance evaluations and characterizations of these hardware accelerations, using both micro-benchmarks and a server consolidation benchmark (vConsolidate). The experimental results demonstrate an up to 77% improvement with these hardware accelerations, 49% of which is due to EPT and another 28% due to SR-IOV.