Beyond the Hypervisor Hype Michael A. Salsburg, Ph.D Unisys

Outline Introduction to Hypervisors A Performance Comparison of Hypervisors It’s the I/O (again) Future Directions for Virtualized I/O Capacity Planning for transforming from Physical to Virtual Virtualization and Utility Computing Virtualization and Carrier-Level Service Virtualization Benchmarks

Introduction to Hypervisors Hypervisor executes directly on hardware (no OS) VMM presents itself to the virtual machine as the hardware Less code for hypervisor implies higher resiliency –Xen implements DOM0 Xen paravirtualizes – VMware does not

A Performance Comparison of Hypervisors VMware and Xen publish different results with the same benchmarks Benchmarks –SPECcpu2000 Integer tests – CPU intensive –Passmark – memory –intensive –Netperf – network specific –SPECjbb2005 – java application server workload –SPECcpu2000 compilation tests – compilation benchmark for assessing development workloads

A Performance Comparison of Hypervisors VMware Xen Results XenSource Xen Results

REALITY Check I/O transfers at “wire speed” does not tell the whole story…… An I/O-intensive workload can result in twice the CPU utilization on a virtual machine when compared to the physical one

It’s the I/O (again) Hypervisor emulation of a device –Discovery –Device Control –Data Transfer –I/O Interrupts Pure Emulation –Support for Legacy O/S and device drivers Performance Impact

It’s the I/O (again) Paravirtualization of Device Drivers are an essential element in good performance The replacement of the native device drivers is an essential part of virtualization –Physical to Virtual Transformation

Future Directions for Virtualized I/O Intel Processors No Virtualization

Future Directions for Virtualized I/O Current Hypervisors

Future Directions for Virtualized I/O Intel’s VT-d provides Protection Domains –Protects Direct Memory Access (DMA) between device and VM Interrupt remapping architecture Supports caching of remapping-structure entries on the device VMMs with VT-d

Capacity Planning for transforming from Physical to Virtual

Virtualization and Utility Computing “No More Down Time” Corporate workloads grow and shrink on shared resources –When resources are scarce, new servers are provisioned –Otherwise, business policies dictate priorities for utility-wide CPU cycles What will it take for Business Units to share resources? Chargeback in a Virtualized Environment Real Time Infrastructure

Ticket Sales Scenario.. using a real time infrastructure

Digital Dashboard

Ticketing Process Ticket Request BEGIN END Establish Special Needs Ticket Reserved Search Loyalty Program Pick Location Credit Card Verification Issue Ticket Reserve Ticket

Ticketing Process Ticket Request BEGIN END Establish Special Needs Ticket Reserved Search Loyalty Program Pick Location Credit Card Verification Issue Ticket Reserve Ticket

BAM as an Early Warning System Bill Gassman, David McCoy, Web Services & Application Integration Conference –19 November 2003

Credit Card Verification getName getCreditCard getNumber contactCCAgent

Visualizing RTI Animation

Virtualization and Carrier-Level Service Recovery-Oriented Computing The network of software components share the same memory –An error or attack can corrupt all memory within the OS and its applications –Solution –reboot, which initializes all components Partition dependent components using virtualization –Failure causes re-booting of dependent components

Virtualization Benchmarks Tiled Workload –Mail Server – Actions / Minute –Java Server – New Orders / Sec –Standby Server – N/A –Web Server - Accesses / Sec –Database Server – Commits / Sec – File Server - MB/second Scores are Aggregated

Virtualization Benchmark WorkloadWI1I2I3 Mail server Java server Standby server---- Web server Database server File server WorkloadI1I2I3 Mail server Java server1.01 Standby server--- Web server.98 Database server File server Geometric Mean Normalized Raw

The Future and Beyond Expect to see new applications of virtualization Closely monitor successes/failures in high transaction and data-intensive environments Will Xen Survive? When will Viridian see the light of day?