Advisor(s)

David R. Kaeli

Contributor(s)

Waleed Meleis, Peter J. Desnoyers

Date of Award

2008

Date Accepted

1-2009

Degree Grantor

Northeastern University

Degree Level

M.S.

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department or Academic Unit

College of Engineering. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Keywords

Electrical engineering, Virtual appliances

Subject Categories

Virtual reality in management, Benchmarking (Management)--Mathematical models

Disciplines

Engineering

Abstract

System virtualization technology continues to increase in popularity across the datacenter. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are now using virtual machines to deliver software appliances to take advantage of management features provided by a virtualized environment. However, there is a growing need to better understand the performance of applications in this environment. New tools and approaches are needed to be able to model, evaluate and characterize software appliances when run on virtualized platforms. To understand benchmarking in a server appliance environment, we select a commercial appliance, and use it to develop our approach to virtual appliance performance characterization. We begin with a study of AsteriskNOW, a SIP proxy server appliance. To explore this design space, we consider a range of virtual machine configurations. We also analyze the virtual appliance performance when the appliance scales both vertically and horizontally in the virtualized environment. One of the outgrowths of this initial study is that we have developed a general methodology for studying any virtualized appliance. We have designed and implemented VAmark, a performance characterization framework to collect and analyze the performance data available on virtual appliances. VAmark provides the capability to understand the behavior of the virtual appliance, quantify the associated performance interference, and identify the source of performance issues by profiling and analyzing system level statistics and hardware events. To better understand the sharing of hardware resources in a virtual appliance environment, we utilize a number of standard workloads. We characterize SPECint2006 as a compute-intensive appliance, and both Apache Webserver and MySQL database server as typical server appliances. The VAmark framework can be used to evaluate and guide the deployment of virtual appliances for system integration.

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Rights Information

Copyright 2009

Rights Holder

Zhaoquian Chen


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