ZIVM: A Zero-Copy Inter-VM Communication Mechanism for Cloud Computing

With the advent of virtualization technology and its propagation to the infrastructure of Cloud distributed systems, there is an emergent request for more effective means of communication between virtual machines (VMs) lying on distributed memory than traditional message based communication means. This paper presents a distributed virtual shared memory mechanism called ZIVM (Zero-copy Inter-VM) to ease the programming of inter-VM communications in a transparent way and at the same time to achieve comparable and bearable execution performance. ZIVM has been implemented as a virtual cluster on a hosted virtual machine using the KVM hypervisor. Experimental results have shown near native performance in terms of latency and bandwidth.