DEHype: Retrofitting Hypervisors for a Resource-Disaggregated Environment

Abstract

Resource disaggregation has been proposed as a solution for resource under-utilization in data centers. However, host virtualization technologies, which are the basic building blocks for constructing data centers, are implemented without considering the disaggregated resources. In addition, we discover that a RDMA I/O unit plays a significant role in the performance of a disaggregated resource environment. In this study, we propose DEHype, which alleviates the inefficiency of the hypervisors utilized in a disaggregated environment by investigating host virtualization technologies that are suitable for disaggregated memory systems. Specifically, DEHype aims to identify and improve the performance issues associated with virtual machines through KVM/QEMU in a disaggregated resource environment. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimizations in improving the performance of disaggregated memory systems. DEHype achieves up to a 351% improvement over the state-of-the-art disaggregated memory system.