Impacts on the I/O performance of the virtual disk in Xen

• Main Author: Zhang, Quan
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/39998

Storage systems are complicated, especially after the virtualization technology has been introduced. As is a key metric, the I/O throughput of the storage in the virtual machine environment is remarkably lower than that in the non-virtualized environment. This disparity should be alleviated because of the growing popularity of virtual machines. In this paper, four factors, which affect the I/O throughput of the generic Linux storage subsystem and further degrade virtualization on this storage subsystem, are testified by quantitative approaches, leading to the effective solutions of improving the I/O throughput. The improvements are verified by experiments; however, the overhead of virtualization is inevitable. Therefore, a further way to offset the overhead is also given in this thesis.