Measuring CPU Overhead for I/O Processing in the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor

Overview

Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) are gaining popularity in enterprise environments as a software-based solution for building shared hardware infrastructures via virtualization. In this paper, using the Xen VMM, the authors present a light weight monitoring system for measuring the CPU usage of different virtual machines including the CPU overhead in the device driver domain caused by I/O processing on behalf of a particular virtual machine.