Highly consolidated servers with container-based virtualization
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2017 IEEE. A huge number of inter-connected computers run in data centers. These computers consume large amount of power. Server consolidation with virtualization is a popular method to address this problem. The more computers are consolidated, the more energy is saved. However, highly consolidating, wherein many servers are consolidated into one physical computer, may result in large performance decline. Achieving high consolidation without large performance decline is important. Container-based operating system virtualization is an emerging method for constructing low-overhead virtualized environment. In this work, we focus on Docker, a popular container-based virtualizing system, and investigate its performance, especially performance in highly consolidated environment. First, we compare the performance with and without container-based virtualization, then show that container-based virtualization can provide similar performance to that without virtualization in CPU processing and networking but cannot provide comparable performance in I/O processing with the default setup. Second, we explore the relationship between the number of containers and the obtained performance. We then demonstrate that the I/O performance severely decreases as the number of consolidated servers increase. Third, we discuss the reason why the I/O performance drops largely and applications of highly consolidated servers.
