FlexBSO: Flexible Block Storage Offload for Datacenters

TL;DR

FlexBSO introduces a hardware-assisted approach using SmartNICs to improve virtual block device performance, reduce costs, and increase flexibility in datacenter environments, addressing limitations of traditional virtualization methods.

Contribution

The paper presents FlexBSO, a novel hardware-assisted solution leveraging SmartNICs to optimize virtual block storage offload in datacenters, overcoming cost, flexibility, and performance issues.

Findings

Reduces host CPU cycles for IO operations.

Improves storage virtualization flexibility.

Enhances IO performance by minimizing VM exits.

Abstract

Efficient virtualization of CPU and memory is standardized and mature. Capabilities such as Intel VT-x [3] have been added by manufacturers for efficient hypervisor support. In contrast, virtualization of a block device and its presentation to the virtual machines on the host can be done in multiple ways. Indeed, hyperscalers develop in-house solutions to improve performance and cost-efficiency of their storage solutions for datacenters. Unfortunately, these storage solutions are based on specialized hardware and software which are not publicly available. The traditional solution is to expose virtual block device to the VM through a paravirtualized driver like virtio [2]. virtio provides significantly better performance than real block device driver emulation because of host OS and guest OS cooperation. The IO requests are then fulfilled by the host OS either with a local block device such as an SSD drive or with some form of disaggregated storage over the network like NVMe-oF or iSCSI. There are three main problems to the traditional solution. 1) Cost. IO operations consume host CPU cycles due to host OS involvement. These CPU cycles are doing useless work from the application point of view. 2) Inflexibility. Any change of the virtualized storage stack requires host OS and/or guest OS cooperation and cannot be done silently in production. 3) Performance. IO operations are causing recurring VM EXITs to do the transition from non-root mode to root mode on the host CPU. This results into excessive IO performance impact. We propose FlexBSO, a hardware-assisted solution, which solves all the mentioned issues. Our prototype is based on the publicly available Bluefield-2 SmartNIC with NVIDIA SNAP support, hence can be deployed without any obstacles.