characterization & analysis of a server consolidation benchmark
Virtualization is already becoming ubiquitous in data centers for the consolidation of multiple workloads on a single platform. However, there are very few performance studies of server consolidation workloads in the literature. In this paper, our goal is to analyze the performance characteristics of a representative server consolidation workload. To address this goal, we have carried out extensive measurement and profiling experiments of a newly proposed consolidation workload (vConsolidate). vConsolidate consists of a compute intensive workload, a web server, a mail server and a database application running simultaneously on a single platform. We start by studying the performance slowdown of each workload due to consolidation on a contemporary multi-core dual-processor Intel platform. We then look at architectural characteristics such as CPI (cycles per instruction) and L2 MP (L2 misses per instruction) I, and analyze the benefits of larger caches for such a consolidated workload. We estimate the virtualization overheads for events such as context switches, interrupts and page faults and show how these impact the performance of the workload in consolidation. Finally, we also present the execution profile of the server consolidation workload and illustrate the life of each VM in the consolidated environment. We conclude by presenting an approach to developing a preliminary performance model based on the performance.
vconsolidate virtualization overheads xen cache scaling data center virtualization