Fido: Fast Inter-Virtual-Machine Communication for Enterprise Appliances

Fido is a high-performance inner-VM communication mechanism between VMs on an enterprise appliance.

Enterprise-class server appliances such as network-attached storage systems or network routers can benefit greatly from virtualization technologies. However, current inter-VM communication techniques have significant performance overheads when employed between highly-collaborative appliance components, thereby limiting the use of virtualization in such systems. We present present Fido, an inter-VM communication mechanism that leverages the inherent relaxed trust model between the software components in an appliance to achieve high performance. We have also developed common device abstractions - a network device (MMNet) and a block device (MMBlk) on top of Fido.

We evaluate MMNet and MMBlk using microbenchmarks and find that they outperform existing alternative mechanisms. As a case study, we have implemented a virtualized architecture for a network-attached storage system incorporating Fido, MMNet, and MMBlk. We use both microbenchmarks and TPC-C to evaluate our virtualized storage system architecture. In comparison to a monolithic architecture, the virtualized one exhibits nearly no performance penalty in our benchmarks, thus demonstrating the viability of virtualized enterprise server architectures that use Fido.

In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2009 (USENIX '09)

Resources

A copy of the paper is attached to this posting.fido-burtsev.pdf