Impacts on the I/O performance of the virtual disk in Xen

Storage systems are complicated, especially after the virtualization technology has been introduced. As is a key metric, the I/O throughput of the storage in the virtual machine environment is remarkably lower than that in the non-virtualized environment. This disparity should be alleviated because of the growing popularity of virtual machines. In this paper, four factors, which affect the I/O throughput of the generic Linux storage subsystem and further degrade virtualization on this storage subsystem, are testified by quantitative approaches, leading to the effective solutions of improving the I/O throughput. The improvements are verified by experiments; however, the overhead of virtualization is inevitable. Therefore, a further way to offset the overhead is also given in this thesis.Science, Faculty ofComputer Science, Department ofGraduat