Nested Virtualization Without the Nest

Mathieu Bacou (1) , Grégoire Todeschi (1) , Alain Tchana (2) , Daniel Hagimont (1, 3)

1 IRIT-SEPIA - Système d’exploitation, systèmes répartis, de l’intergiciel à l’architecture
2 I3S - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux, et Systèmes de Sophia Antipolis
3 Toulouse INP - Institut National Polytechnique (Toulouse)

With the increasing popularity of containers, managing them on top of virtual machines becomes a common practice, called nested virtualization. This paper presents BrFusion and Hostlo, two solutions that address each of two networking issues of nested virtualization: network virtualization duplication and virtual machine-bounded pod deployments. The first issue lengthens network packet paths while the second issue leads to resource fragmentation. For instance, in respect with the first issue, we measured a throughput degradation of about 68% and a latency increase of about 31% in comparison with a single networking layer. We prototype BrFusion and Hostlo in Linux KVM/QEMU, Docker and Kubernetes systems. The evaluation results show that BrFusion leads to the same performance as a single-layer virtualization deployment. Concerning Hostlo, the results show that more than 11% of cloud clients see their cloud utilization cost reduced by down to 40%.

Mots clés: Virtualization; Nested virtualization; Container; Network; Orchestrator

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]; Système d'exploitation [cs.OS]; Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]; Systèmes embarqués

Mathieu Bacou, Grégoire Todeschi, Alain Tchana, Daniel Hagimont. Nested Virtualization Without the Nest. 48th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP 2019), Aug 2019, Kyoto, Japan. pp.1-10. ⟨hal-02947732⟩