Type
Text
Type
Thesis
Advisor
Stoller, Scott | Porter, Donald E | Ferdman, Mike.
Date
2015-12-01
Keywords
cloud computing, containers, deduplication, overheads, virtualization, VMs | Engineering
Department
Department of Computer Science.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77265
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
Containers or OS-based virtualization have seen a recent resurgence in deployment. Containers have low memory footprint and start-up time but provide weaker security isolation than Virtual Machines (VMs). Incapability to load kernel modules and support multiple OS, and platform-dependence limits the functionality of containers. On the other hand, VMs or hardware-based virtualization are platform-independent and are more secure, but have higher overheads. A data centre operator chooses among these two virtualization technologies —VMs and containers—when setting up guests on cloud infrastructure. Density and Latency are two critical factors for a data centre operator because they determine the efficiency of cloud computing. Therefore, this thesis contributes updated density and latency measurements of KVM VMs and Linux Containers with a recent kernel version and best practices. This work also studies the memory footprint of KVM VMs and Linux Containers. In addition, it identifies three ways to improve the density of KVM VMs by lowering the memory footprint: improving existing memory deduplication techniques, removing unused devices emulated by QEMU, and removing unused pages from the guest address space. | Containers or OS-based virtualization have seen a recent resurgence in deployment. Containers have low memory footprint and start-up time but provide weaker security isolation than Virtual Machines (VMs). Incapability to load kernel modules and support multiple OS, and platform-dependence limits the functionality of containers. On the other hand, VMs or hardware-based virtualization are platform-independent and are more secure, but have higher overheads. A data centre operator chooses among these two virtualization technologies —VMs and containers—when setting up guests on cloud infrastructure. Density and Latency are two critical factors for a data centre operator because they determine the efficiency of cloud computing. Therefore, this thesis contributes updated density and latency measurements of KVM VMs and Linux Containers with a recent kernel version and best practices. This work also studies the memory footprint of KVM VMs and Linux Containers. In addition, it identifies three ways to improve the density of KVM VMs by lowering the memory footprint: improving existing memory deduplication techniques, removing unused devices emulated by QEMU, and removing unused pages from the guest address space. | 55 pages
Recommended Citation
Agarwal, Kavita, "A Study of Virtualization Overheads" (2015). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3086.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3086