Performance implications of over-allocation of virtual CPUs

Abstract

A major advantage of cloud environments is that one can balance the load by migrating virtual machines (VMs) from one server to another. High performance and high resource utilization are also important in a cloud. We have observed that over-allocation of virtual CPUs to VMs (i.e. allocating more vCPUs to VMs than there CPU cores on the server) when there are many VMs running on one host can reduce performance. However, if we do not use any over-allocation of virtual CPUs we may suffer from poor resource utilization after VM migration. Thus, it is important to identify and quantify performance bottlenecks when running in virtualized environment. The results of this study will help virtualized environment service providers to decide how many virtual CPUs should be allocated to each VM.