Analysis of Resource Isolation and Resource Management in Network Virtualization

Abstract: Context. Virtualized networks are considered a major advancement in the technology of today, virtualized networks are offering plenty of functional benefits compared to todays dedicated networking elements. The virtualization allows network designers to separate networks and adapting the resources depending on the actual loads in other words, Load Balancing. Virtual networks would enable a minimized downtime for deployment of updates and similar tasks by performing a simple migration and then updating the linking after properly testing and preparing the Virtual Machine with the new software. When this technology is successfully proven to be efficient or evaluated and later adapted to the existing flaws. Virtualized networks will at that point claim the tasks of todays dedicated networking elements. But there are still unknown behaviors and effects of the technology for example, how the scheduler or hypervisor handles the virtual separation since they do share the same physical transmission resources.Objectives. By performing the experiments in this thesis, the hope is to learn about the effects of virtualization and how it performs under stress. By learning about the performance under stress it would also increase the knowledge about the efficiency of network virtualization. The experiments are conducted by creating scripts, using already written programs and systems, adding different loads and measuring the effects, this is documented so that other students and researchers can benefit from the research done in this thesis.Methods. In this thesis 5 different methodologies are performed: Experimental validation, statistical comparative analysis, resource sharing, control theory and literature review. Two systems are compared to previous research by evaluating the statistical results and analyzing them. As mentioned earlier the investigation of this thesis is focusing on how the scheduler executes the resource sharing under stress. The first system which is the control test is designed without any interference and a 5 Mbit/s UDP stream which is going through the system under test and being timestamped on measurement points on both the ingress and the egress, the second experiment involves an interfering load of a 5 Mbit/s UDP stream on the same system under test. Since it is a complex system quite some literature reviewing was done but mostly to gain a understanding and an overview of the different parts of the system and so that some obstacles would be able to be avoided.Results. The statistical comparative analysis of the experiments produced two graphs and two tables containing the coefficient of variance of the two experiments. The graph of the control test produced a graph with a quite even distribution over the time intervals with a coefficient of variance difference to the power of 10−3 and increasing somewhat over the larger time intervals. The second experiment with two virtual machines and an interfering packet stream are more distributed over the 0.0025 seconds and the 0.005 seconds intervals with a larger difference than the control test having a difference to the power of 10−2, showing some signs of a bottleneck in the system.Conclusions. Since the performance of the experiments and also the statistical handling of the data took longer than expected the choice was made to not deploy the system using Open Virtual Switch instead of Linux Bridge, hence there is not any other experiments to compare the performance with. But from referred research under related works the researcher concluded that the difference between Open Virtual Switch and Linux Bridge is small when compared without introducing any load. This is also confirmed on the website of Open Virtual Switch which states that Open Virtual Switch uses the same base as Linux Bridge. Linux Bridge is performing according to the expectations, it is a simple yet powerful tool and the results are confirming the previous research which claims that there are bottlenecks in the system. According to the pre-set requirement for validity for this experiment the difference of the CoV would be greater than to the power of 10−5, the measured difference was to the power of 10−2 which gives support to the theory that there are bottlenecks in the system. In the future it would be interesting to examine more about the effects of different hypervisors, virtualization techniques, packet generators etcetera to tackle these problems. A company that have taken countermeasures is Intel who have developed DPDK which confronts these efficiency problems by tailoring the scheduler towards the specific tasks. The downside of Intel’s DPDK is that it limits the user to Intel processors and removes one of the most important benefits of virtualization, the independence. But Intel have tried to keep it as independent as possible by maintaining DPDK as open source.