Cooperative VM migration for a virtualized HPC cluster with VMM-bypass I/O devices

Abstract

An HPC cloud, a flexible and robust cloud computing service specially dedicated to high performance computing, is a promising future e-Science platform. In cloud computing, virtualization is widely used to achieve flexibility and security. Virtualization makes migration or checkpoint/restart of computing elements (virtual machines) easy, and such features are useful for realizing fault tolerance and server consolidations. However, in widely used virtualization schemes, I/O devices are also virtualized, and thus I/O performance is severely degraded. To cope with this problem, VMM-bypass I/O technologies, including PCI passthrough and SR-IOV, in which the I/O overhead can be significantly reduced, have been introduced. However, such VMM-bypass I/O technologies make it impossible to migrate or checkpoint/restart virtual machines, since virtual machines are directly attached to hardware devices. This paper proposes a novel and practical mechanism, called Symbiotic Virtualization (SymVirt), for enabling migration and checkpoint/restart on a virtualized cluster with VMM-bypass I/O devices, without the virtualization overhead during normal operations. SymVirt allows a VMM to cooperate with a message passing layer on the guest OS, then it realizes VM-level migration and checkpoint/restart by using a combination of a PCI hotplug and coordination of distributed VMMs. We have implemented the proposed mechanism on top of QEMU/KVM and the Open MPI system. All PCI devices, including Infiniband and Myrinet, are supported without implementing specific para-virtualized drivers; and it is not necessary to modify either of the MPI runtime and applications. Using the proposed mechanism, we demonstrate reactive and proactive FT mechanisms on a virtualized Infiniband cluster. We have confirmed the effectiveness using both a memory intensive micro benchmark and the NAS parallel benchmark. Moreover, we also show that postcopy live migration enables us to reduce the down time of an application as the memory footprint increases.