VCONF: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Virtual Machine Auto-configuration

Virtual machine (VM) technology enables multiple VMs to share resources on the same host. Resources allocated to the VMs should be re-configured dynamically in response to the change of application demands or resource supply. Because VM execution involves privileged domain and VM monitor, this causes uncertainties in VMs’ resource to performance mapping and poses challenges in online determination of appropriate VM configurations. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) based approach, namely VCONF, to automate the VM configuration process. VCONF employs model-based RL algorithms to address the scalability and adaptability issues in applying RL in real system management. Experimental results on both controlled environments and a testbed imitating production systems with Xen VMs and representative server workloads demonstrate the effectiveness of VCONF. The approach is able to find optimal (near optimal) configurations in small scale systems and shows good adaptability and scalability.