Analysis and evaluation of a XEN based virtual router

Fabienne Anhalt (1) , Pascale Primet (1)

1 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme

Virtualization techniques are applied to improve features like isolation, security, mobility and dynamic reconfiguration in distributed systems. To introduce these advantages into the network where they are highly required, an interesting approach is to virtualize the internet routers themselves. This technique could enable several virtual networks of different types, owners and protocols to coexist inside one physical network. In this study, we propose a model of a virtual router we have implemented with XEN and we evaluate its properties. We show that the performance is close to the performance of non virtualized software routers, but causes an important processing overhead and unfairness in the share of the resources. We study the impact of the virtual machine scheduler parameters on the network performance and we show that the module which is responsible of forwarding the packets between the virtual machines and the physical interfaces is the critical point of network communications.

Mots clés: Network performance; virtualization; XEN; scheduling

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Fabienne Anhalt, Pascale Primet. Analysis and evaluation of a XEN based virtual router. [Research Report] RR-6658, INRIA. 2008, pp.60. ⟨inria-00320620v2⟩