Padmashree K Apparao
Intel Corporation
Characterization and Analysis of a Server Consolidation Benchmark using
Xen 
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This talk will describe the research we are doing in Intel using the Xen
hypervisor to do an in-depth architectural characterization of a server
consolidation workload, with an ultimate goal of developing performance
models to predict the performance of the workload on future platforms.
We have done extensive profiling and instrumentation in the hypervisor
to understand the performance behavior of the workload. The workload,
vConsolidate consists of a consolidation of workloads, namely a compute
intensive workload, SPECjbb, a database workload, Sysbench, a Web server
workload, Webbench and a mail server, Exchange. Our goal is to
understand the behavior of individual applications and also the behavior
of how these applications are affected by virtualization overheads, how
they are affected when they run in an interleaved fashion with other
workloads, how they share resources within the platform and finally how
they scale in terms of future platform requirements. In this talk we
will also discuss the instrumentation done in Xen to help us analyze the
VMM behavior under consolidated workloads and also opportunities for
instrumentation hooks in the hypervisor and how those would help us in
achieving our goals of analyzing server consolidation performance.