Resource Provisioning based on Preempting Virtual Machines in Resource Sharing Environments

Resource provisioning is one of the main challenges in large-scale resource sharing environments such as federated Grids. Recently, many resource management systems in these environments have started to use the lease abstraction and virtual machines (VMs) for resource provisioning. In resource sharing environments resource providers serve requests from external users along with their own local users. The problem arises when there is not sufficient resources for local users, who have higher priority than external ones, and need resources urgently. This problem could be solved by preempting leases from external users and allocating them to the local ones. However, preempting leases entails side-effects in terms of overhead time as well as increasing makespan of external requests. In this paper, we model the overhead of preempting VMs. Then, to reduce the impact of these side-effects, we propose and compare several policies that determine the proper set of lease(s) for preemption. We evaluate our proposed policies through simulation as well as real experimentation in the context of InterGrid under different working conditions. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed preemption policies serve up to 72% more local requests without increasing the rejection ratio of external requests. Copyright c © 0000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.