Sandpiper: Black-box and gray-box resource management for virtual machines

Publication Date

2009

Journal or Book Title

COMPUTER NETWORKS

Abstract

Virtualization can provide significant benefits in data centers by enabling dynamic virtual machine resizing and migration to eliminate hotspots. We present Sandpiper, a system that automates the task of monitoring and detecting hotspots, determining a new mapping of physical to virtual resources, resizing virtual machines to their new allocations, and initiating any necessary migrations. Sandpiper implements a black-box approach that is fully OS- and application-agnostic and a gray-box approach that exploits OS- and application-level statistics. We implement our techniques in Xen and conduct a detailed evaluation using a mix of CPU, network and memory-intensive applications. Our results show that Sandpiper is able to resolve single server hotspots within 20s and scales well to larger, data center environments. We also show that the gray-box approach can help Sandpiper make more informed decisions, particularly in response to memory pressure.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2009.04.014

Pages

2923-2938

Volume

53

Issue

17

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS