Quality of Service for I/O Workloads in Multicore Virtualized Servers

Emerging trend of multi-core servers promises to be the panacea for all data-center issues with system virtualization as the enabling technology. System virtualization allows one to create virtual replicas of the physical system, over which independent virtual machines can be created, complete with their own, individual operating systems, software, and applications. This provides total system isolation of the virtual machines. Apart from this, the key driver for virtualization adoption in data-centers will be safe virtual machine performance isolation that can be achieved over a consolidated server with shared resources. This paper identifies the basic requirements for performance isolation of virtual machines on such servers. The consolidation focus is on enterprise workloads that are a mix of compute and I/O intensive workloads.