The emerging cloud computing paradigm provides administrators and IT organizations with tremendous freedom to dynamically migrate virtualized computing services between physical servers in cloud data centers. Virtualization and VM migration capabilities enable the data center to consolidate their computing services and use minimal number of physical servers. VM migration offers great benefits s...

This article describes the introduction of a virtual microscope (VM) that has allowed preclinical histology teaching to be fashioned to better suit the needs of approximately 900 undergraduate students per year studying medicine, dentistry, or veterinary science at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Features of the VM implementation include: (1) the facility for students and teachers to...

Users worldwide can access utility-oriented computing services through cloud computing. It enables the pay-as-you-go model to host well-known consumer, educational, and business applications. However, data centers encounter significant issues in effectively managing resources, ensuring optimal performance, reducing energy usage as demand for is increasing rapidly. A possible strategy reduce con...

In spite of the widespread adoption of virtualization and consolidation, there exists no consensus with respect to how to benchmark consolidated servers that run multiple guest VMs on the same physical hardware. For example, VMware proposes VMmark which basically computes the geometric mean of normalized throughput values across the VMs; Intel uses vConsolidate which reports a weighted arithmet...

Introduction Virtualization is widely used in consolidation projects and as a basis for new server deployments. The benefits in energy efficiency, space, cooling as well as cost are immediately apparent, as many applications don't require the full computational power of even the smallest available new server today. However, in addition to all these benefits, virtualization also introduces some ...

Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation is one of the key mechanisms of designing an energy-efficient dynamic Cloud resource management system. It is based on the premise that migrating VMs into fewer number of Physical Machines (PMs) can achieve both optimization objectives, increasing the utilization of Cloud servers while concomitantly reducing the energy consumption of the Cloud data center. How...

In a virtual machine (VM) consolidation environment, it has been observed that CPU sharing among multiple VMs will lead to I/O processing latency because of the CPU access latency experienced by each VM. In this paper, we present vTurbo, a system that accelerates I/O processing for VMs by offloading I/O processing to a designated core. More specifically, the designated core – called turbo core ...