Guaranteeing QoS of media-based applications in virtualized environment
With the rapid development of web technology and smart phone, multimedia contents spread all over the Internet. The prevalence of virtualization technology enables multimedia service providers to run media servers in virtualized servers or rented virtual machines (VMs) in a cloud environment. Although server consolidation using virtualization can substantially increase the efficient use of server resources, it introduces resources competition among VMs running different applications. Recently, hypervisors do not make any Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee for media-based applications if they are consolidated with other network-intensive applications, which leads to significant performance degradation. For example, Xen only offers a static method to allocate network bandwidth. In this paper, we find that the performance of media-based applications running in VMs degrades seriously when they are consolidated with other VMs running network-intensive applications and argues that dynamic network bandwidth allocation is essential to guarantee the QoS of media-based applications. Then, we present a dynamic network bandwidth allocation system in virtualized environment, which allocates network bandwidth dynamically and effectively, and does not interrupt running services in VMs. The experiments show that our system can not only guarantee the QoS of media-based applications well but also maximize the system's the overall performance while ensuring the QoS of media-based applications.
virtualization multimedia network management