Secure I/O device sharing among virtual machines on multiple hosts

Abstract

Virtualization allows flexible mappings between physical resources and virtual entities, and improves allocation efficiency and agility. Unfortunately, most existing virtualization technologies are limited to resources in a single host. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a multi-host I/O device virtualization system called Ladon, which enables I/O devices to be shared among virtual machines running on multiple hosts in a secure and efficient way. Specifically, Ladon uses a PCIe network to connect multiple servers with PCIe devices and allows VMs running on these servers to directly interact with these PCIe devices without interfering with one another. Through an evaluation of a fully operational Ladon prototype, we show that there is no throughput and latency penalty of the multi-host I/O virtualization enabled by Ladon compared to those of the existing single-host I/O virtualization technology.