SURVEY OF APPROACHES TO IMPROVE INTER VIRTUAL MACHINE COMMUNICATION EFFICIENCY ON XEN PLATFORM

Abstract: Virtual Machines (VMs) are building blocks of today's cloud computing infrastructure. VMs provide isolation across applications and services while sharing a common hardware platform. At the same time network intensive applications, such as web services/database applications, are being consolidated into single physical platform. This leads to Network I/O workloads which are dominating in many data centers. Though strict isolation between co-resident VMs ensures security and a lot of research interest is dedicated to strengthen this feature, which undermines the potential communication channels and limits maximum achievable communication throughput between co-resident VMs. Virtual Network Interface (VNI) based communication serves the purpose of transparency however traversal through entire network stack degrades the performance when communicating VMs are co-located. Data integrity is also compromised as data might travel unprotected via an insecure path where it could be altered or intercepted. Recently proposed Inter Virtual Machine Communication (IVMC) methods for co-located VMs include shared memory, customized libraries or API. Though shared memory based approaches seems like the obvious solution, they have certain issues regarding security and transparency. None of these initiatives take security considerations into account. Unfortunately none of these solutions meet all the requirements of IVMC.  

Keywords: IVMC, Virtual Machine Communication, Shared Memory Communication