A Lightweight Network Communication Mechanism In Virtual Clusters

Virtualization is being widely used in enterprise data centers, high performance computing and cloud computing environment. In these environments, network communication performance is a key factor. There are some shortcomings of VMs'network communication in virtual clusters. The TCP/IP protocol is too complex for non-inter-domain communication of VMs, and Xen doesn't optimize the performance of inter-domain communication of VMs.A lightweight communication mechanism in virtual clusters is used to improve network communication performance of VMs. Based on the characteristic of VMs' network communication, our lightweight communication mechanism uses different techniques to optimize the performance of non-inter-domain communication and inter-domain communication. A window based lightweight communication protocol is used for non-inter-domain communication, which is simpler than TCP protocol. The lightweight communication protocol provides binary compatibility with existing applications. Legacy applications do not require to be modified or be recompiled to run on the lightweight communication mechanism. To achieve this, the lightweight communication protocol does some modification to the Linux kernel's related function pointers of guest VMs. Meanwhile, in order to improve the performance of inter-domain communication, our lightweight communication mechanism uses XenLoop for inter-domain communication.By the use of our lightweight network communication mechanism, test showed that compare with RMAP, non-inter-domain communication's throughput increased of about 7.9%. Compared with TCP/IP protocol, throughput of inter-domain communication increased of about 157%. We also tested that applications written use the standard socket interface can run correctly on our lightweight network communication mechanism.