Availability-aware Virtual Cluster Allocation in Bandwidth-Constrained Datacenters

As greater numbers of data-intensive applications are required to process big data in bandwidth-constrained datacenters with heterogeneous physical machines (PMs) and virtual machines (VMs), network core traffic is experiencing rapid growth. The VMs of a virtual cluster (VC) must be allocated as compactly as possible to avoid bandwidth-related bottlenecks. Since each PM/switch has a certain failure probability, a VC may not be executed when it meets with any PM/switch fault. Although the VMs of a VC can be spread out across different fault domains to minimize the risk of violating the availability requirement of the VC, this increases the network core traffic. Therefore, avoiding the decrease in availability caused by the heterogeneous PM/switch failure probabilities and bandwidth-related bottlenecks has been a constant challenge. In this paper, we first introduce a joint optimization function to measure the overall risk cost and overall bandwidth usage in the network core to allocate the same set of data-intensive applications. We then introduce an approach to maximize the value of the joint optimization function. Finally, we performed a side-by-side comparison with prior algorithms, and the experimental results show that our approach outperforms the other existing algorithms.