Measurement and Analysis of Networking Performance in Virtualised Environments

Abstract: Mobile cloud computing, having embraced the ideas like computation ooading, mandates a low latency, high speed network to satisfy the quality of service and usability assurances for mobile applications. Networking performance of clouds based on Xen and Vmware virtualisation solutions has been extensively studied by researchers, although, they have mostly been focused on network throughput and bandwidth metrics. This work focuses on the measurement and analysis of networking performance of VMs in a small, KVM based data centre, emphasising the role of virtualisation overheads in the Host-VM latency and eventually to the overall latency experienced by remote clients. We also present some useful tools such as Driftanalyser, VirtoCalc and Trotter that we developed for carrying out specific measurements and analysis. Our work proves that an increase in a VM's CPU workload has direct implications on the network Round trip times. We also show that Virtualisation Overheads (VO) have significant bearing on the end to end latency and can contribute up to 70% of the round trip time between the Host and VM. Furthermore, we thoroughly study Latency due to Virtualisation Overheads as a networking performance metric and analyse the impact of CPU loads and networking workloads on it. We also analyse the resource sharing patterns and their effects amongst VMs of different sizes on the same Host. Finally, having observed a dependency between network performance of a VM and the Host CPU load, we suggest that in a KVM based cloud installation, workload profiling and optimum processor pinning mechanism can be e ectively utilised to regulate network performance of the VMs. The ndings from this research work are applicable to optimising latency oriented VM provisioning in the cloud data centres, which would benefit most latency sensitive mobile cloud applications.