Providing Network Performance Isolation in VDE-Based Cloud Computing Systems

In a cloud computing system, virtual machines owned by different clients are co-hosted on a single physical machine. It is vital to isolate network performance between the clients for ensuring fair usage of the constrained and shared network resources of the physical machine. Unfortunately, the existing network performance isolation techniques are not effective for cloud computing systems because they are difficult to be adopted in a large scale and require non-trivial modification to the network stack of a guest OS. In this paper, we propose a performance isolation-enabled virtual distributed Ethernet (PIE-VDE) to overcome such difficulties. It is a network virtualization software module running on a host OS. It intends to (1) allocate fair share of outgoing link bandwidth to the co-hosted clients and (2) divide a client's share to the virtual machines owned by it in a fair way. Our approach supports full virtualization of a guest OS, ease in wide scale adoption, limited modification to the existing system, low run-time overhead and work-conserving servicing. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism. Every client received at least 99.5% of its bandwidth share as specified by its weight.