A Heuristic Time Sharing Policy for Backup Resources in Cloud System

Cloud computing promises high performance and cost-efficiency. However, most cloud infrastructures operate at a low utilization, which greatly adheres cost effectiveness. Previous works focus on seeking efficient virtual machine (VM) consolidation strategies to increase the utilization of virtual resources in production environment, but overlook the under-utilization of backup virtual resources. We propose a heuristic time sharing policy of backup VMs derived from the restless multi-armed bandit problem. The proposed policy achieves increasing backup virtual resources utilization and providing high availability. Both the results in simulation and prototype system experiments show that the traditional 1:1 backup provision can be extended to 1:M (M≫1) between the backup VMs and the service VMs, and the utilization of backup VMs can be enhanced significantly.