Storage Card Client Bypasses Hypervisor for VM I/O
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Solution Overview
Problem
The direct deployment of the client in the physical server in distributed storage systems leads to significant consumption of computing resources, as the client and back-end driver in the hypervisor consume physical CPU and memory resources, and the front-end driver in the virtual machine consumes virtual CPU and memory resources, resulting in inefficient resource utilization.
Innovation Solution
A storage card is inserted into the physical server, allowing the virtual machine to directly communicate with the client on the storage card, bypassing the hypervisor, and enabling the client to manage I/O requests without using the hypervisor, thus reducing the computational load on the physical server by shifting resource consumption to the storage card.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If the client is directly deployed in the physical server, then the storage function can be provided for the virtual machine, but the computing resources (physical CPU and memory) are significantly consumed
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the client deployment location by moving the client from the physical server to an external storage device. This segmentation separates the storage management function from the computing resources, allowing the virtual machine to access storage through the storage device directly without consuming physical server computing resources.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary mechanism where the virtual machine can directly access the storage device without going through the hypervisor for I/O operations. This intermediary direct access path bypasses the resource-consuming hypervisor involvement while maintaining the storage function provision.
2Ease of operation
If the hypervisor is used to coordinate I/O operations, then the virtual machine can access the physical storage device, but the system complexity increases due to multiple software layers
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the I/O operation path from the hypervisor layer by enabling direct communication between the virtual machine and the storage device. This removes the unnecessary hypervisor involvement from the I/O path while maintaining the ability to perform I/O operations, thereby reducing system complexity.
3Reliability
If the client and back-end driver are deployed in the hypervisor, then the storage management can be coordinated, but the resource utilization efficiency decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the client deployment from the hypervisor by placing it on an external storage device. This segmentation allows storage management coordination to be maintained while improving resource utilization efficiency by eliminating the overhead of running the client within the hypervisor environment.
Data Source
AI summary
A storage device operation method is applied to the physical server. A storage card is inserted into the physical server. When a virtual machine on the physical server receives a data read/write instruction, the virtual machine generates an I/O request for a physical storage device, and sends the I/O request to a client in the storage card; the client transmits the I/O request to a server, so that the server performs an I/O operation on the physical storage device based on the I/O request. Since the virtual machine directly sends the I/O request to the client in the storage card without using a hypervisor in the physical server, computing resources of the physical server are conserved.