A high performance inter-domain communication approach for virtual machines

In virtualization technology field, researches mainly focus on strengthening the isolation barrier between virtual machines (VMs) that are co-resident within a single physical machine. At the same time, there are many kinds of distributed communication-intensive applications such as web services, transaction processing, graphics rendering and high performance grid applications, which need to communicate with other virtual machines at the same platform. Unfortunately, current inter-VM communication method cannot adequately satisfy the requirement of such applications. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a high performance inter-VM communication method called IVCOM based on Xen virtual machine environment. In para-virtualization, IVCOM achieves high performance by bypassing some protocol stacks and privileged domain, shunning page flipping and providing a direct and high-performance communication path between VMs residing in the same physical machine. But in full-virtualization, IVCOM applies a direct communication channel between domain 0 and Hardware Virtualization based VM (HV²M) and can greatly reduce the VM entry/exit operations, which has improved the HV²M performance. In the evaluation of para-virtualization consisting of a few of benchmarks, we observe that IVCOM can reduce the inter-VM round trip latency by 70% and increase throughput by up to 3 times, which prove the efficiency of IVCOM in para-virtualized environment. In the full-virtualized one, IVCOM can reduce 90% VMX transition operations in the communication between domain 0 and HV²M.