[Xen-devel] New Project Proposal - Please provide comments

[KARTHIK BALAJI G <findkb@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

We are working on a new project idea for xen platform. I have summarized as well as given detailed description of what we are trying to achieve. I request your comments on the feasibility of this project. Also I have pointed some relevant works which I feel is primitive considering the goal we are trying to achieve. I request to point me to relevant links if there are any other works going on in this area. I am not familiar with xen. So it would be great if someone can guide me on this project.

SUMMARY:

we have a proposal to develop virtual machine migration algorithms that can

(1) minimize the total number of physical machines used,
(2) balance the loads across physical machines, and
(3) meet the same performance requirement of individual applications.

The most challenging issue of this project is to correlate an application's performance with the amount of physical resources (CPU, memory capacity and disk bandwidth) allocated to it for ARBITRARY applications. If such correlation can be derived, we can use it to determine the resource requirement for each virtual machine (assuming each virtual machine runs a single application), and the issues of (1) and (2) above can be trivially solved.

More Details :


PROBLEM:


Enterprise applications have resource demands varying over time due to
user demands. The current virtualization technologies are inadequate
in dynamically achieving such demands (Service level objectives) for
enterprise applications. Resources are over provisioned based on
pre-production environment results. Because of this some data centres
are under utilized and some are over utilized resulting in poor
performance of the hosted applications. This essentially includes the
following challenges.

     a. Estimating resource requirements of an application running on
native hardware needs to be transferred a virtualized environment.
Additional resource requirements incurred by virtualization overhead
needs to be taken into account. Our goal should be to minimize the
number of physical machines used by consolidating the workload.

     b. Once successfully transferred to a shared virtualized
environment we need a automated resource control system that
dynamically adapts to varying application needs. By this we mean,
                    1. Finding the relationship between application
performance and resource allocated.
                    2. Migrating virutal machines to balance load
across physical servers without comprising on availability and
performance.
                    3. Enterprise applications have complex mutl-tier
architecture where distinct components of same application resides in
different servers. So the resource requirements should not only be
calculated locally but also across nodes where other components of
application is hosted.

EXISTING SOLUTIONS:

1. VMWARE DRS

2. TRACE BASED APPROACH - The application resource usage traces are
routinely collected over a period to get a representative application
profile. These traces can be used to consolidate the workload. But
these pre-production environment results does not scale well in real
world situations.

3. AUTOCONTROL(Hp Labs) - This consists of two parts a. Model
Estimator that derives the relation between application and its
resource allocation, b. MIMO (multi input,multi output) resource
controller that allocates the required resource amounts. The advantage
of this tool is, it takes care of application load as well as the load
on each virtualized node. For this tool we need to specify application
priority, performance metric and performance target. The application
controller issues requests to node controllers. The node controller
determines whether it has enough resources to satisfy all demands and
computes resource reallocation. The computed value is fed into MIMO
resource scheduler which allocates resources to VM in real time. If
the performance target of the applications cannot be met Autocontrol
should provide service level differentiation based on application
priorities.

Thank you,

-KARTHIK


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