Application Performance Isolation in Virtualization

Modern data centers use virtual machine based implementation for numerous advantages like resource isolation, hardware utilization, security and easy management. Applications are generally hosted on different virtual machines on a same physical machine. Virtual machine monitor like Xen is a popular tool to manage virtual machines by scheduling them to use resources such as CPU, memory and network. Performance isolation is the desirable thing in virtual machine based infrastructure to meet Service Level Objectives. Many experiments in this area measure the performance of applications while running the applications in different domains, which gives an insight into the problem of isolation. In this paper we run different kind of benchmarks simultaneously in Xen environment to evaluate the isolation strategy provided by Xen. Results are presented and discussed for different combinations and a case of I/O intensive applications with low response latency has been presented.