An optimal disk allocation in cloud virtual machine deployment

摘要

Virtualization technology is the foundation of Cloud services. To achieve the maximum hardware utilization, Cloud service providers usually host many guest VMs on one VM host. However, as the number of VM increases, the disk accessing performance drops significantly. Disk performance in multiple VM environment is one of the most significant problems in cloud environment. In this work, we propose a mechanism to improve the disk performance issue in multiple VM environment. With the proposed mechanism, disk I/O performance impact caused by multiple VM is improved. The experimental result shows that the proposed mechanism can effectively reduce the disk I/O performance impact caused by disk access commands issued simultaneously by multiple VM guests in one physical host machine. When we implement the proposed mechanism in our production private VDI cloud, the overall performance of the Windows System running on VMs are greatly improved. The disk usage for hosting VMs are significantly dropped. As the main memory increased on physical host machine, maximum VM number hosted on this physical machine can be fourfold without significant performance drop.