High performance network virtualization with SR-IOV

Virtualization poses new challenges to I/O performance. The single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) standard allows an I/O device to be shared by multiple Virtual Machines (VMs), without losing performance. We propose a generic virtualization architecture for SR-IOV-capable devices, which can be implemented on multiple Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs). With the support of our architecture, the SR-IOV-capable device driver is highly portable and agnostic of the underlying VMM. Because the Virtual Function (VF) driver with SR-IOV architecture sticks to hardware and poses a challenge to VM migration, we also propose a dynamic network interface switching (DNIS) scheme to address the migration challenge. Based on our first implementation of the network device driver, we deployed several optimizations to reduce virtualization overhead. Then, we conducted comprehensive experiments to evaluate SR-IOV performance. The results show that SR-IOV can achieve a line rate throughput (9.48 Gbps) and scale network up to 60 VMs, at the cost of only 1.76% additional CPU overhead per VM, without sacrificing throughput and migration.

► Propose a generic virtualization architecture for SR-IOV devices.
► Optimizations to reduce virtualization overhead.
► Propose a dynamic network interface switching scheme for migration.
► Comprehensive experiments running up to 60 VMs.