Virtual Asymmetric Multiprocessor for Interactive Performance of Consolidated Desktops

This paper presents virtual asymmetric multiprocessor, a new scheme of virtual desktop scheduling on multi-core processors for user-interactive performance. The proposed scheme enables virtual CPUs to be dynamically performance-asymmetric based on their hosted workloads. To enhance user experience on consolidated desktops, our scheme pro-vides interactive workloads with fast virtual CPUs, which have more computing power than those hosting background workloads in the same virtual machine. To this end, we devise a hypervisor extension that transparently classifies background tasks from potentially interactive workloads. In addition, we introduce a guest extension that manipulates the scheduling policy of an operating system in favor of our hypervisor-level scheme so that interactive performance can be further improved. Our evaluation shows that the proposed scheme significantly improves interactive performance of application launch, Web browsing, and video playback ap-plications when CPU-intensive workloads highly disturb the interactive workloads. 1