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Conference

Virtual Execution Environments 

About: Virtual Execution Environments is an academic conference. The conference publishes majorly in the area(s): Virtual machine & Virtualization. Over the lifetime, 295 publications have been published by the conference receiving 14089 citations.


Papers
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Proceedings ArticleDOI
11 Jun 2005
TL;DR: Xenoprof is presented, a system-wide statistical profiling toolkit implemented for the Xen virtual machine environment that will facilitate a better understanding of performance characteristics of Xen's mechanisms allowing the community to optimize the Xen implementation.
Abstract: Virtual Machine (VM) environments (e.g., VMware and Xen) are experiencing a resurgence of interest for diverse uses including server consolidation and shared hosting. An application's performance in a virtual machine environment can differ markedly from its performance in a non-virtualized environment because of interactions with the underlying virtual machine monitor and other virtual machines. However, few tools are currently available to help debug performance problems in virtual machine environments.In this paper, we present Xenoprof, a system-wide statistical profiling toolkit implemented for the Xen virtual machine environment. The toolkit enables coordinated profiling of multiple VMs in a system to obtain the distribution of hardware events such as clock cycles and cache and TLB misses. The toolkit will facilitate a better understanding of performance characteristics of Xen's mechanisms allowing the community to optimize the Xen implementation.We use our toolkit to analyze performance overheads incurred by networking applications running in Xen VMs. We focus on networking applications since virtualizing network I/O devices is relatively expensive. Our experimental results quantify Xen's performance overheads for network I/O device virtualization in uni- and multi-processor systems. With certain Xen configurations, networking workloads in the Xen environment can suffer significant performance degradation. Our results identify the main sources of this overhead which should be the focus of Xen optimization efforts. We also show how our profiling toolkit was used to uncover and resolve performance bugs that we encountered in our experiments which caused unexpected application behavior.

571 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
11 Mar 2009
TL;DR: The Entropy resource manager for homogeneous clusters is proposed, which performs dynamic consolidation based on constraint programming and takes migration overhead into account and the use of constraint programming allows Entropy to find mappings of tasks to nodes that are better than those found by heuristics based on local optimizations.
Abstract: Clusters provide powerful computing environments, but in practice much of this power goes to waste, due to the static allocation of tasks to nodes, regardless of their changing computational requirements. Dynamic consolidation is an approach that migrates tasks within a cluster as their computational requirements change, both to reduce the number of nodes that need to be active and to eliminate temporary overload situations. Previous dynamic consolidation strategies have relied on task placement heuristics that use only local optimization and typically do not take migration overhead into account. However, heuristics based on only local optimization may miss the globally optimal solution, resulting in unnecessary resource usage, and the overhead for migration may nullify the benefits of consolidation.In this paper, we propose the Entropy resource manager for homogeneous clusters, which performs dynamic consolidation based on constraint programming and takes migration overhead into account. The use of constraint programming allows Entropy to find mappings of tasks to nodes that are better than those found by heuristics based on local optimizations, and that are frequently globally optimal in the number of nodes. Because migration overhead is taken into account, Entropy chooses migrations that can be implemented efficiently, incurring a low performance overhead.

546 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
13 Jun 2007
TL;DR: By combining a block-level solution with pre-copying and write throttling, it is shown that an entire running web server can be transferred, including its local persistent state, with minimal disruption.
Abstract: So far virtual machine (VM) migration has focused on transferring the run-time memory state of the VMs in local area networks (LAN). However, for wide-area network (WAN) migration it is crucial to not just transfer the VMs image but also transfer its local persistent state (its file system) and its on-going network connections. In this paper we address both: by combining a block-level solution with pre-copying and write throttling we show that we can transfer an entire running web server, including its local persistent state, with minimal disruption --- three seconds in the LAN and 68 seconds in the WAN); by combining dynDNS with tunneling, existing connections can continue transparently while new ones are redirected to the new network location. Thus we show experimentally that by combining well-known techniques in a novel manner we can provide system support for migrating virtual execution environments in the wide area.

469 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
11 Mar 2009
TL;DR: The design, implementation, and evaluation of post-copy based live migration for virtual machines (VMs) across a Gigabit LAN are presented and improvements in several migration metrics including pages transferred, total migration time and network overhead are shown.
Abstract: We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of post-copy based live migration for virtual machines (VMs) across a Gigabit LAN. Live migration is an indispensable feature in today's virtualization technologies. Post-copy migration defers the transfer of a VM's memory contents until after its processor state has been sent to the target host. This deferral is in contrast to the traditional pre-copy approach, which first copies the memory state over multiple iterations followed by a final transfer of the processor state. The post-copy strategy can provide a "win-win" by reducing total migration time closer to its equivalent time achieved by non-live VM migration. This is done while maintaining the liveness benefits of the pre-copy approach. We compare post-copy extensively against the traditional pre-copy approach on top of the Xen Hypervisor. Using a range of VM workloads we show improvements in several migration metrics including pages transferred, total migration time and network overhead. We facilitate the use of post-copy with adaptive pre-paging in order to eliminate all duplicate page transmissions. Our implementation is able to reduce the number of network-bound page faults to within 21% of the VM's working set for large workloads. Finally, we eliminate the transfer of free memory pages in both migration schemes through a dynamic self-ballooning (DSB) mechanism. DSB periodically releases free pages in a guest VM back to the hypervisor and significantly speeds up migration with negligible performance degradation.

454 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
05 Mar 2008
TL;DR: This paper is the first to study the impact of the VMM scheduler on performance using multiple guest domains concurrently running different types of applications, and offers insight into the key problems in VMM scheduling for I/O and motivates future innovation in this area.
Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between domain scheduling in avirtual machine monitor (VMM) and I/O performance. Traditionally, VMM schedulers have focused on fairly sharing the processor resources among domains while leaving the scheduling of I/O resources as asecondary concern. However, this can resultin poor and/or unpredictable application performance, making virtualization less desirable for applications that require efficient and consistent I/O behavior.This paper is the first to study the impact of the VMM scheduler on performance using multiple guest domains concurrently running different types of applications. In particular, different combinations of processor-intensive, bandwidth-intensive, andlatency-sensitive applications are run concurrently to quantify the impacts of different scheduler configurations on processor and I/O performance. These applications are evaluated on 11 different scheduler configurations within the Xen VMM. These configurations include a variety of scheduler extensions aimed at improving I/O performance. This cross product of scheduler configurations and application types offers insight into the key problems in VMM scheduling for I/O and motivates future innovation in this area.

378 citations

Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Conference in previous years
YearPapers
202115
202014
201915
20187
201718
201615