Adding advanced storage controller functionality via low-overhead virtualization
Muli Ben-Yehuda, Michael Factor, Eran Rom, Avishay Traeger, Eran Borovik, Ben-Ami Yassour · 2012
Historically, storage controllers have been extended by integrating new code, e.g., file serving, database process-ing, deduplication, etc., into an existing base. This in-tegration leads to complexity, co-dependency and insta-bility of both the original and new functions. Hypervi-sors are a known mechanism to isolate different func-tions. However, to enable extending a storage controller by providing new functions in a virtual machine (VM), the virtualization overhead must be negligible, which is not the case in a straightforward implementation. This paper demonstrates a set of mechanisms and techniques that achieve near zero runtime performance overhead for using virtualization in the context of a storage system. 1