An Empirical Study on Memory Sharing of Virtual Machines for Server Consolidation

Chang, Chao-Rui; Wu, Jan‐Jan; Liu, Pangfeng

doi:10.1109/ispa.2011.31

Cited by 36 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…There were many studies in analyzing and exploiting page sharing opportunities in virtualization environments [10,12,14,18,20,23,24,26]. All these work assume small pages are used in the system and the interaction between page sharing and large page backing is not considered.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proactively Breaking Large Pages to Improve Memory Overcommitment Performance in VMware ESXi

Guo

Kim

Baskakov

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments

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VMware ESXi [28] leverages hardware support for MMU virtualization available in modern Intel/AMD CPUs. To optimize address translation performance when running on such CPUs, ESXi preferably uses host large pages (2MB in x86-64 systems) to back VM's guest memory. While using host large pages provides best performance when host has sufficient free memory, it increases host memory pressure and effectively defeats page sharing. Hence, the host is more likely to hit the point where ESXi has to reclaim VM memory through much more expensive techniques such as ballooning or host swapping. As a result, using host large pages may significantly hurt consolidation ratio.To deal with this problem, we propose a new host large page management policy that allows to: a) identify 'cold' large pages and break them even when host has plenty of free memory; b) break all large pages proactively when host free memory becomes scarce, but before the host starts ballooning or swapping; c) reclaim the small pages within the broken large pages through page sharing. With the new policy, the shareable small pages can be shared much earlier and the amount of memory that needs to be ballooned or swapped can be largely reduced when host memory pressure is high. We also propose an algorithm to dynamically adjust the page sharing rate when proactively breaking large pages using a VM large page shareability estimator for higher efficiency.Experimental results show that the proposed large page management policy can improve the performance of various workloads up to 2.1x by significantly reducing the amount of ballooned or swapped memory when host memory pressure

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proactively Breaking Large Pages to Improve Memory Overcommitment Performance in VMware ESXi

Guo

Kim

Baskakov

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In our work, we mainly compare the memory utilization of KVM's virtual machine and LXC container in the presence of uKSM functionality. Though several literature [17], [18], [19] have quantified the memory sharing opportunity between VMs using KSM, they do not answer fives questions listed in Section I. …”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Exploiting Page Sharing in a Virtualised Environment - An Empirical Study of Virtualization Versus Lightweight Containers

Sonone

Soni

Nathan

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing

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While virtualized solutions are firmly entrenched in cloud data centers to provide isolated execution environments, the chief overhead it suffers from is that of memory consumption. Even pages that are common in multiple virtual machines (VMs) on the same physical machine (PM) are not shared and multiple copies exist thereby draining valuable memory resources and capping the number of VMs that can be instantiated on a PM. Lightweight containers (LWCs) on the other hand does not suffer from this situation since virtually everything is shared via Copy on Write semantics. As a result the capacity of a PM to host LWCs is far higher than hosting equivalent VMs. In this paper, we evaluate a solution using uKSM to exploit memory page redundancy amongst multiple VMs on a PM executing the same operating system thereby enabling a comparison of the two technologies as far as its capacity to instantiate multiple instances is concerned. We performed a thorough empirical evaluation of the two solutions and present comprehensive results.

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“…Overall, the caching and sharing eliminates a substantial fraction of interdomain memory redundancy [7,31] without the expense of explicit deduplication.…”

Section: Object Page Caching and Mappingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Flexible, Lightweight Virtualization Alternative

Moolenbroek

Appuswamy

Tanenbaum

2014

Proceedings of International Conference on Systems and Storage

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In recent times, two virtualization approaches have become dominant: hardware-level and operating system-level virtualization. They differ by where they draw the virtualization boundary between the virtualizing and the virtualized part of the system, resulting in vastly different properties. We argue that these two approaches are extremes in a continuum, and that boundaries in between the extremes may combine several good properties of both. We propose abstractions to make up one such new virtualization boundary, which combines hardware-level flexibility with OS-level resource sharing. We implement and evaluate a first prototype.

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An Empirical Study on Memory Sharing of Virtual Machines for Server Consolidation

Cited by 36 publications

References 3 publications

Proactively Breaking Large Pages to Improve Memory Overcommitment Performance in VMware ESXi

Proactively Breaking Large Pages to Improve Memory Overcommitment Performance in VMware ESXi

On Exploiting Page Sharing in a Virtualised Environment - An Empirical Study of Virtualization Versus Lightweight Containers

Towards a Flexible, Lightweight Virtualization Alternative

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