A look into virtual machine malleability
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Authors
Goldszmidt, Jonathan
Issue Date
2014-05
Type
Electronic thesis
Thesis
Thesis
Language
ENG
Keywords
Computer science
Alternative Title
Abstract
The benefits provided by virtual machine malleability can be put into 3 categories: scalability and elasticity, energy improvements and process scheduling. Traditionally, the approach of application scaling at the application layer involves writing an application with malleability in mind. Using our method of scaling, applications do not need to be written with malleability in mind to be able to scale, as long as the application workloads are independent or they can communicate over a network. The approach of energy optimization typically involves consolidating virtual machines onto fewer hosts and putting idle hosts in a low power or off state. Although this method works quite well, certain virtual machine configurations cannot be consolidated without significantly impacting performance. Using virtual machine malleability, processes running on a virtual machine that is on an overloaded physical machine can be split across multiple virtual machines, each with a smaller resource footprint. Each of these split machines can then be consolidated without causing the physical hosts to become overloaded. Such flexibility in virtual machine scheduling enables better energy consumption. Our experiments with virtual machine malleability show that application scalability is possible with negligible performance degradation, that it is possible to dynamically reconfigure workloads to achieve set resource utilization, which in turn improves energy utilization.
Description
May 2014
School of Science
School of Science
Full Citation
Publisher
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY