TA3461

Tech Preview: IO DRS - Providing Performance Isolation to VMs in Shared Storage Environments

Rapid adoption of virtualization technologies has led to increased utilization of physical resources, which are multiplexed among numerous workloads with varying demands and importance. Virtualization has also accelerated the deployment of shared storage systems, which offer many advantages in such environments. Effective resource management for shared storage systems is challenging, even in research systems with complete end-to-end control over all system components. Commercially-available storage arrays provide insufficient support for controlling service rates for virtual machines sharing the sharing the same storage volume or LUN, making it difficult for administrators to isolate workloads.
To address these issues, we introduce IO DRS, an experimental system that enforces proportional-share fairness among VMs accessing shared storage, independent of the type of storage array used. Each virtual machine is assigned IO shares and limits which IO DRS uses to provide proportional IO allocation. We also present some preliminary results showing how it can be used to provide differential quality of service for unmodified virtual machines while maintaining high efficiency.

Technology & Architecture

Breakout Session

Preview, IO DRS, Performance, Shared Storage

1 Hour

Ajay Gulati, Member of Technical Staff, VMware, Inc.
Irfan Ahmad, Staff Engineeer, VMware, Inc.