Automated Modeling of I/O Performance and Interference Effects in Virtualized Storage Systems

Abstract:

Modern IT systems frequently employ virtualization technology to maximize resource efficiency. By sharing physical resources, however, the virtualized storage used in such environments can quickly become a bottleneck. Performance modeling and evaluation techniques applied prior to system deployment help to avoid performance issues. In current practice, however, modeling I/O performance is usually avoided due to the increasing complexity of modern virtualized storage systems. In this paper, we present an automated modeling approach based on statistical regression techniques to analyze I/O performance and interference effects in the context of virtualized storage systems. We demonstrate our approach in three case studies creating performance models with two I/O benchmarks. The case studies are conducted in a real-world environment based on IBM System z and IBM DS8700 server hardware. Using our approach, we effectively create performance models with excellent prediction accuracy for both I/O-intensive applications and I/O performance interference effects with a mean prediction error up to 7%.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{noorshams_automated_2014,
    title = {{Automated Modeling of I/O Performance and Interference Effects in Virtualized Storage Systems}},
    author = {Noorshams, Q. and Busch, A. and Rentschler, A. and Bruhn, D. and Kounev, S. and Tuma, P. and Reussner, R.},
    year = {2014},
    booktitle = {{Proc. 34th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) DCPERF Workshop}},
    publisher = {IEEE},
    doi = {10.1109/ICDCSW.2014.26},
    pages = {88--93},
}

Proceedings paper