LAVA: Lifetime-Aware VM Allocation with Learned Distributions and Adaptation to Mispredictions

TL;DR

LAVA enhances VM scheduling efficiency in cloud data centers by using lifetime distributions and repredictions, reducing resource wastage, energy consumption, and VM migrations, with proven benefits in Google's production environment.

Contribution

Introduces LAVA, a novel lifetime-aware VM allocation method combining distribution-based predictions and adaptive scheduling, improving efficiency and reliability over prior one-shot prediction approaches.

Findings

Reduces resource strandedness by ~3% and memory by ~2%.

Increases number of empty hosts by 2.3-9.2 percentage points.

Decreases VM migrations for defragmentation and maintenance.

Abstract

Scheduling virtual machines (VMs) on hosts in cloud data centers dictates efficiency and is an NP-hard problem with incomplete information. Prior work improved VM scheduling with predicted VM lifetimes. Our work further improves lifetime-aware scheduling using repredictions with lifetime distributions versus one-shot prediction. Our approach repredicts and adjusts VM and host lifetimes when incorrect predictions emerge. We also present novel approaches for defragmentation and regular system maintenance, which are essential to our data center reliability and optimizations, and are not explored in prior work. We show repredictions deliver a fundamental advance in effectiveness over one-shot prediction. We call our novel combination of distribution-based lifetime predictions and scheduling algorithms Lifetime Aware VM Allocation (LAVA). LAVA reduces resource stranding and increases the number of empty hosts, which are critical for large VM scheduling, cloud system updates, and reducing dynamic energy consumption. Our approach runs in production within Google's hyperscale cloud data centers, where it improves efficiency by decreasing stranded compute and memory resources by ~3% and ~2% respectively. It increases empty hosts by 2.3-9.2 pp in production, reducing dynamic energy consumption, and increasing availability for large VMs and cloud system updates. We also show a reduction in VM migrations for host defragmentation and maintenance. In addition to our fleet-wide production deployment, we perform simulation studies to characterize the design space and show that our algorithm significantly outperforms the prior state of the art lifetime-based scheduling approach.