Virtualization technology has gained significant adoption in various domains as a means to lower costs and enable greener solutions. Recently, there has been a significant amount of interest in employing virtualization technology in the telecommunications domain in order to save costs through server consolidation and to provide energy-efficient solutions. The availability of high-end multi-core servers provides powerful platforms for deployment. However, the telecommunications domain poses unique challenges for virtualization technology to be successfully deployed even in these compute-rich multi-core environments. This work discusses these challenges. It provides a detailed analysis of the performance implications of hosting enterprise IP telephony infrastructure in virtualized environments. Unlike signaling applications that are comparatively more tolerant of underlying platform performance, media applications are far more demanding. Our work, therefore, focuses on the performance of media applications (media server, voice-mail, etc.) in virtualized environments. We develop a model for workloads used in enterprise IP telephony. We then evaluate the impact of various hypervisor scheduler and I/O parameters in order to determine good parameter settings for such workloads. Our experiments use the Xen virtualization platform. The results presented in this work will be useful for telecommunication solution providers to understand the capabilities and limitations of virtual environments when deploying their applications.
No abstract
Abstract-Virtualization technology is popular today for hosting Internet and cloud-based compute services. Recently, the IP Communications domain has seen the adoption of virtualization with enterprise telephony solutions being hosted in virtualized environments. A deployment scenario that is common in the IP communications domain is the virtual appliance. A virtual appliance encapsulates the IP Telephony application, such as a VoIP Call/Proxy Server, and the OS software, within a virtual machine. This allows for a single physical machine to host a number of virtual appliances -each being a telephony application deployed on an OS configuration for which it has been optimized. Apart from the well known benefits of virtualization such as server consolidation and improved resource utilization, a promising capability of virtualization technology is that of live virtual machine migration. In case of failure, a live virtual appliance can be efficiently and transparently migrated to a different physical machine with minimal impact on clients using the hosted IP communication service, thereby providing high-availability and fault tolerance. This work studies the feasibility of deploying IP communications infrastructure on virtualized platforms, with high-availability and reliability as a goal. We model a real IP telephony workload to understand the performance implications of such a deployment, and the effectiveness of these high-availability mechanisms. We use quantitative methods to measure performance such as call throughput, delay and packet loss. By understanding the characteristics of IP telephony workloads, we identify specific aspects that affect performance and also identify some optimal configurations. The results presented in this work will be useful for telecommunication service providers to understand the benefits and limitations of such a deployment.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.