vThrot: Fine-Grained, Virtual I/O Resource Redistribution Scheme

As the size of host storage increases, VMs on the same host would receive a larger virtual storage, which is then divided into multiple virtual partitions. Each partition is sufficiently large to independently execute heterogeneous applications. However, most of the current I/O resource management systems focus on allocating host resources among VMs running on the same host, rather than redistributing the I/O resources allocated to the VMs between their virtual partitions. In this paper, we present a dynamic, fine-grained virtual I/O throttling scheme, called vThrot, where I/O resources allocated to a VM can be dynamically redistributed on its virtual partitions. In vThrot, each virtual partition independently executes heterogeneous applications while retaining their unique I/O characteristics. Furthermore, to reflect the urgency of applications, it is equipped with the priority-based hint that can effectively be passed to the host kernel, facilitating faster I/O processing.