Accounting Per-VM Resource Usage for I/O Activities in Virtualized Environment

Abstract

Virtualization technology in Cloud computing environment offers efficient resource and power utilization through enabling multiple operating system instances to run concurrently within virtual machines on a single physical machine. Virtualization layers provide the billing system of clouds for business purpose. Current cloud computing systems focus processor utilization or number of virtual machines allocated by each user for billing. However, the billing system based on processor utilization may be unfair when several virtual machines that run on single physical machine have different workloads respectively. To improve fairness of billing and resource provisioning, the system has to consider about not only processer but also I/O resource utilization. The Xen virtual machine monitor follows a split device driver model to handle I/O requests from guest domains. Virtualized system has a driver domain, which performs I/O operations on behalf of guest domains and uses their native device to access I/O device directly. For this reason, the driver domain executes delegated instructions to processing I/O activities from guest domains. But the delegated instructions are not considered for scheduling domains or accounting. This paper presents the profiling technique of delegated processor usage to the driver domain for I/O operations per virtual machine in virtualized environment by Xen. And we introduce relationship between network utilization of guest domains and delegated processor utilization.