Abstract-Host-side SSD caches represent a powerful knob for improving and controlling storage performance and improve performance isolation. We present Centaur, as a host-side SSD caching solution that uses cache sizing as a control knob to achieve storage performance goals. Centaur implements dynamically partitioned per-VM caches with per-partition local replacement to provide both lower cache miss rate, better performance isolation and performance control for VM workloads. It uses SSD cache sizing as a universal knob for meeting a variety of workloadspecific goals including per-VM latency and IOPS reservations, proportional share fairness, and aggregate optimizations such as minimizing the average latency across VMs. We implemented Centaur for the VMware ESX hypervisor. With Centaur, times for simultaneously booting 28 virtual desktops improve by 42% relative to a non-caching system and by 18% relative to a unified caching system. Centaur also implements per-VM shares for latency with less than 5% error when running microbenchmarks, and enforces latency and IOPS reservations on OLTP workloads with less than 10% error.

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Unikernels leverage library OS architectures to run isolated workloads on the cloud. They have garnered attention in part due to their promised performance characteristics such as small image size, fast boot time, low memory footprint and application performance. However, those that aimed at generality fall short of the application compatibility, robustness and, more importantly, community that is available for Linux. In this paper, we describe and evaluate Lupine Linux, a standard Linux system that-through kernel configuration specialization and system call overhead elimination-achieves unikernel-like performance, in fact outperforming at least one reference unikernel in all of the above dimensions. At the same time, Lupine can run any application (since it is Linux) when faced with more general workloads, whereas many unikernels simply crash. We demonstrate a graceful degradation of unikernel-like performance properties.