Performance profiling in a virtualized environment

Abstract

Virtualization is a key enabling technology for cloud computing. Many applications deployed in a cloud run in virtual machines. However, profilers based on CPU performance counters do not work well in a virtualized environment. In this paper, we explore the possibilities for achieving performance profiling in virtual machine monitors (VMMs) built on paravirtualization, hardware assistance, and binary translation. We present the design and implementation of performance profiling for a VMM based on the x86 hardware extensions, with some preliminary experimental results. 1