High performance virtual network embedding virtual machine monitor

The virtual computing environment integrated with virtual machines (VMs) and virtual overlay networks possesses many important advantages in cloud computing and green computing. However, the un-negligible overhead of existing virtual networks prevents their vast use in high-performance distributed computing. This paper has designed and implemented a high-speed virtual network system VNET/P. VNET/P is a layer 2 network abstract for virtual machines, which enables a distributed collection of virtual machines to be maintained in a location independent way across wide-area network. Different from the existing virtual network in user layer, VNET/P is embedded into an open-sourced Palacios virtual machine monitor (VMM), has much higher bandwidth and performance scalability, and achieves near-native performance and negligible overhead on 1Gbps Ethernet.