CIVSched: Communication-aware Inter-VM Scheduling in Virtual Machine Monitor Based on the Process

Server consolidation in Cloud Computing makes it possible for multiple servers or desktops to run on one physical server to get high resource utilization, low cost and less energy consumption. However, the scheduler in virtual machine monitor (VMM) is agnostic about the communication behavior between the guest operating systems. It leads to inefficient network communication in consolidated environment. In particular, the CPU resource management has a critical impact on the network latency between co-resident virtual machines (VMs) when there are CPU-bound and I/O-bound workloads existing simultaneously. It brings a negative impact on latency-sensitive VMs. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of CIVSched scheduling to make the VMM aware of the communication behavior between two inter-VMs running on the same virtual platform. CIVSched inspects the network packets transmitted between local domains and find the destination VM and the target process inside that will receive the packets. Then, the destination VM and the target process are preferentially scheduled by VMM scheduler and guest OS scheduler respectively. The cooperation of these two schedulers makes the network packets received by the target application timely. Experimental results show that the CIVSched scheduling can reduce the average response time of network traffic by up to 18% for the highly consolidated environment while keeping the fairness of the VMM scheduler.