Management Of Large-Scale Virtualized Data Centers

Large-scale virtualized data centers require cloud providers to implement scalable, autonomic, and energy-efficient cloud management systems. To address these challenges this thesis provides four main contributions. The first one proposes Snooze, a novel Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud management system, which is designed to scale across many thousands of servers and virtual machines (VMs) while being easy to configure, highly available, and energy efficient. For scalability, Snooze performs distributed VM management based on a hierarchical architecture. To support ease of configuration and high availability Snooze implements self-configuring and self-healing features. Finally, for energy efficiency, Snooze integrates a holistic energy management approach via VM resource (i.e. CPU, memory, network) utilization monitoring, underload/overload detection and mitigation, VM consolidation (by implementing a modified version of the Sercon algorithm), and power management to transition idle servers into a power saving mode. A highly modular Snooze prototype was developed and extensively evaluated on the Grid’5000 testbed using realistic applications. Results show that: (i) distributed VM management does not impact submission time; (ii) fault tolerance mechanisms do not impact application performance and (iii) the system scales well with an increasing number of resources thus making it suitable for managing large-scale data centers. We also show that the system is able to dynamically scale the data center energy consumption with its utilization thus allowing it to conserve substantial power amounts with only limited impact on application performance. Snooze is an open-source software under the GPLv2 license. The second contribution is a novel VM placement algorithm based on the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic. ACO is interesting for VM placement due to its polynomial worst-case time complexity, close to optimal solutions and ease of parallelization. Simulation results show that while the scalability of the current algorithm implementation is limited to a smaller number of servers and VMs, the algorithm outperforms the evaluated First-Fit Decreasing greedy approach in terms of the number of required servers and computes close to optimal solutions. In order to enable scalable VM consolidation, this thesis makes two further contributions: (i) an ACO-based consolidation algorithm; (ii) a fully decentralized consolidation system based on an unstructured peer-to-peer network. The key idea is to apply consolidation only in small, randomly formed neighbourhoods of servers. We evaluated our approach by emulation on the Grid’5000 testbed using two state-of-the-art consolidation algorithms (i.e. Sercon and V-MAN) and our ACO-based consolidation algorithm. Results show our system to be scalable as well as to achieve a data center utilization close to the one obtained by executing a centralized consolidation algorithm.