Server Consolidation for Internet Applications in Virtualized Data Centers

TL;DR

This paper addresses server consolidation in virtualized data centers for Internet applications, proposing a new model and heuristic algorithm to minimize physical machines while maintaining performance, with results close to optimal solutions.

Contribution

It introduces an integer linear programming model and a polynomial-time heuristic algorithm for application-to-VM-to-PM mapping in server consolidation.

Findings

Heuristic algorithm uses less than 4.3% more resources than optimal

Existing technologies consume 1.06% more PMs than our approach

Extensive experiments validate the efficiency of the proposed method

Abstract

Server consolidation based on virtualization technology simplifies system administration and improves energy efficiency by improving resource utilizations and reducing the physical machine (PM) number in contemporary service-oriented data centers. The elasticity of Internet applications changes the consolidation technologies from addressing virtual machines (VMs) to PMs mapping schemes which must know the VMs statuses, i.e. the number of VMs and the profiling data of each VM, into providing the application-to-VM-to-PM mapping. In this paper, we study on the consolidation of multiple Internet applications, minimizing the number of PMs with required performance. We first model the consolidation providing the application-to-VM-to-PM mapping to minimize the number of PMs as an integer linear programming problem, and then present a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem in polynomial time. Extensive experimental results show that our heuristic algorithm consumes less than 4.3% more resources than the optimal amounts with few overheads. Existing consolidation technologies using the input of the VM statuses output by our heuristic algorithm consume 1.06% more PMs.