Flux Research Group / School of Computing

Fido: fast inter-virtual-machine communication for enterprise appliances

Anton Burtsev, Kiran Srinivasan, Prashanth Radhakrishnan, Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, Kaladhar Voruganti, and Garth R. Goodson

Proceedings of the 2009 conference on USENIX Annual technical conference (USENIX ATC) 2009.

areas
Operating Systems, Virtualization

abstract

Enterprise-class server appliances such as network-attached storage systems or network routers can benefit greatly from virtualization technologies. However, current inter-VM communication techniques have significant performance overheads when employed between highly-collaborative appliance components, thereby limiting the use of virtualization in such systems. We present Fido, an inter-VM communication mechanism that leverages the inherent relaxed trust model between the software components in an appliance to achieve high performance. We have also developed common device abstractions - a network device (MMNet) and a block device (MMBlk) on top of Fido.

We evaluate MMNet and MMBlk using microbenchmarks and find that they outperform existing alternative mechanisms. As a case study, we have implemented a virtualized architecture for a network-attached storage system incorporating Fido, MMNet, and MMBlk. We use both microbenchmarks and TPC-C to evaluate our virtualized storage system architecture. In comparison to a monolithic architecture, the virtualized one exhibits nearly no performance penalty in our benchmarks, thus demonstrating the viability of virtualized enterprise server architectures that use Fido.