Dynamic Resource Management in Virtualized Environments through Virtual Server Relocation

Virtualization has become an essential technology in the data center. Virtualization improves resource utilization through server consolidation, but it also makes resource management more complex. Golondrina, an autonomic resource management system, was built to use virtual server relocation to handle resource stress situations, that is, situations where the combined resource needs of the virtual servers hosted in a physical machine exceed the resource availability. Experimental evaluation shows that replication offers improvements over migration, and both mechanisms offer improvements over taking no action upon detection of a CPU stress situation. The main contribution of this work is the introduction of virtual server replication as an alternative to migration and the experimental comparison of both mechanisms. Keywords-virtualization; resource management; migration; replication; autonomic computing