A disk bandwidth allocation mechanism with priority

Xibin Wang, Xia Xie, Hai Jin, Xuanhua Shi, Wenzhi Cao, Xijiang Ke

Abstract: Virtualization is a popular technology. Services and applications running on each virtual machine have to compete with each other for limited physical computer or network resources. Each virtual machine has different I/O requirement and special priority. Without proper scheduling resource management, a load surge in a virtual machine may inevitably degrade other’s performance. In addition, each virtual machine may run different kinds of application, which have different disk bandwidth demands and service priorities. When assigning I/O resources, we should deal with each case on demand. In this paper, we propose a dynamic virtual machine disk bandwidth control mechanism in virtualization environment. A Disk Credit Algorithm is introduced to support a fine-gained disk bandwidth allocation mechanism among virtual machines. We can assign disk bandwidth according to each virtual machine’s service priority/weight and its requirement. Related experiments show that the mechanism can improve the VMs’ isolation and guarantee the performance of the specific virtual machine well.