Per-Client Network Performance Isolation in VDE-Based Cloud Computing Servers

Abstract

In a cloud server where multiple virtual machines owned by different clients are co-hosted, excessive traffic generated by a small group of clients may well jeopardize the quality of service of other clients. It is thus very important to provide per-client network performance isolation in a cloud computing environment. Unfortunately, the existing techniques are not effective enough for a huge cloud computing system since it is difficult to adopt them in a large scale and they often require non-trivial modification to the established network protocols. To overcome such difficulties, we propose per-client network performance isolation using VDE (Virtual Distributed Ethernet) as a base framework. Our approach begins with per-client weight specification and support client-aware fair share scheduling and packet dispatching for both incoming and outgoing traffic. It also provides hierarchical fairness between a client and its virtual machines. Our approach supports full virtualization of a guest OS, wide scale adoption, limited modification to the existing system, low run-time overhead and work-conserving servicing. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Every client received at least 99.4% of its bandwidth share as specified by its weight.