Engaging hardware-virtualized network devices in cloud data centers

Recently, virtualization has been an increasingly popular trend in cloud computing due to its ease of administration and efficient resource allocation. Hardware virtualization reduces the overhead of virtualization and significantly improves the performance, comparing favorably to that of physical machines. However, hardware virtualization is complicated to configure and thus is not widely used. This paper proposes integration of hardware-virtualized network devices into Apache CloudStack to bring the benefits to a larger user base. The proposed mechanism allows virtual machines attached to hardware-virtualized network devices to automatically provision and migrate without any user interactions. Experimental results show that after the initial setup is completed, users can provision new virtual machines without any complicated setup, provisioning, or configuration. The results of a performance evaluation reveal that hardware-virtualized network devices provide higher throughput, lower latency, and lower CPU usage. In addition, we have confirmed that the proposed mechanism has negligible impact on the performance of live migration. These results lead to the positive prospect that hardware virtualization is promising for future cloud data centers.