Xen Project Developer Summit

As the number of CPU cores in server-class hardware increases, the demand on a virtualisation platform increases for greater VM density. Most commercial virtualisation platforms now support several hundred VMs per host. This talk will describe the scalability challenges that were overcome in Citrix XenServer 6.2 to enable support for up to 500 fully virtualised or 650 paravirtualised VMs per host. These include limits with event channels, blktap, xenstored and consoled. It will also discuss how dom0 CPU utilisation was reduced in order to make a large number of VMs responsive and thus usable, and will present benchmark measurements quantifying these improvements.