Exploiting Spatial Locality to Improve Disk Efficiency in Virtualized Environments

Virtualization has become a prominent tool in data centers and is extensively leveraged in cloud environments: it enables multiple virtual machines (VMs) - with multiple operating systems and applications - to run within a physical server. However, virtualization introduces the challenging issue of preserving the high disk utilization (i.e., reducing the seek delay and rotation overhead) when allocating disk resources to VMs. Exploiting spatial locality, a key technique for improving disk utilization and performance, faces additional challenges in the virtualized cloud because of the transparency feature of virtualization (hypervisors do not have the information about the access patterns of applications running within each VM). To this end, this paper contributes a novel disk I/O scheduling framework, named Pregather, to improve disk I/O efficiency through exposure and exploitation of the special spatial locality in the virtualized environment (regional and sub-regional spatial locality corresponds to the virtual disk space and applications' access patterns, respectively), thereby improving the performance of disk-intensive applications without harming the transparency feature of virtualization (without a priori knowledge of the applications' access patterns). The key idea behind Pregather is to implement an intelligent model to predict the access regularity of sub-regional spatial locality for each VM. We implement the Pregather disk scheduling framework and perform extensive experiments that involve multiple simultaneous applications of both synthetic benchmarks and aMapReduce application on Xen-based platforms. Our experiments demonstrate the accuracy of our prediction model and indicate that Pregather results in the high disk spatial locality and a significant improvement in disk throughput and application performance.