Measuring CPU overhead for I/O processing in the Xen virtual machine monitor

Abstract

Abstract. Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) are gaining popularity in enterprise environments as a software-based solution for building shared hardware infrastructures via virtualization. In this work, using the Xen VMM, we present a light weight monitoring system for measuring the CPU usage of different virtual machines including the CPU overhead in the device driver domain caused by I/O processing on behalf of a particular virtual ma-chine. Our performance study attempts to quantify and analyze this overhead for a set of I/O intensive workloads. 1