HybridSwap: A scalable and synthetic framework for guest swapping on virtualization platform

In IaaS cloud environments, peak memory demand caused by hotspot applications in Virtual Machine (VM) often results in performance degradation within and outside of this VM. Some solutions such as host swapping and ballooning for memory consolidation and overcommitment have been proposed. These solutions, however, have no help for addressing guest swapping issues inside VM. Even though host holds sufficient memory pages, guest OS is unable to utilize free pages in host directly due to the semantic gap between VMM and it. Our goal is to alleviate the performance degradation by decreasing disk I/O operations generated by guest swapping. Based on the insight analysis of behavioral features of guest swapping, we design HybridSwap, a distributed scalable framework which organize surplus memory in all hosts within data center into virtual pools for swapping. This framework builds up a synthetic swapping mechanism in a peer-to-peer way, which VM can adaptively choose suitable pools for swapping. We implement the prototype of HybridSwap and evaluate it with different benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our solution has the ability to promote the guest swapping efficiency indeed. Even in some cases, it shows 2–5 times of performance promotion compared with the baseline setup.