Publications by Type: Journal and Magazine Articles

Explaining packet delays under virtualization
Citation key	WST-EPDUV-11
Author	Whiteaker, Jon and Schneider, Fabian and Teixeira, Renata
Pages	38–44
Year	2011
ISSN	0146-4833
DOI	http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1925861.1925867
Address	New York, NY, USA
Journal	Computer Communications Review (CCR)
Volume	41
Number	1
Month	January
Publisher	ACM
Abstract	This paper performs controlled experiments with two popular virtualization techniques, Linux-VServer and Xen, to examine the effects of virtualization on packet sending and receiving delays. Using a controlled setting allows us to independently investigate the influence on delay measurements when competing virtual machines (VMs) perform tasks that consume CPU, memory, I/O, hard disk, and network bandwidth. Our results indicate that heavy network usage from competing VMs can introduce delays as high as 100 ms to round-trip times. Furthermore, virtualization adds most of this delay when sending packets, whereas packet reception introduces little extra delay. Based on our findings, we discuss guidelines and propose a feedback mechanism to avoid measurement bias under virtualization.