Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Virtual Machine Workloads: The Case For New Nas Benchmarks, Vasily Tarasov, Dean Hildebrand, Geoffrey H. Kuenning, Erez Zadok

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Virtual Machines (VMs) are widely used in data centers thanks to their manageability, scalability, and ability to consolidate resources. But the shift from physical to virtual clients drastically changes the I/O workloads to seen on NAS servers, due to guest file system encapsulation in virtual disk images and the multiplexing of request streams from different VMs. Unfortunately, current NAS workload generators and benchmarks produce workloads typical to physical machines.

This paper makes two contributions. First, we studied the extent to which virtualization is changing existing NAS workloads. We observed significant changes, including the disappearance of …