Performance-oriented Cloud Provisioning: Taxonomy and Survey

Cloud computing is being viewed as the technology of today and the future. Through this paradigm, the customers gain access to shared computing resources located in remote data centers that are hosted by cloud providers (CP). This technology allows for provisioning of various resources such as virtual machines (VM), physical machines, processors, memory, network, storage and software as per the needs of customers. Application providers (AP), who are customers of the CP, deploy applications on the cloud infrastructure and then these applications are used by the end-users. To meet the fluctuating application workload demands, dynamic provisioning is essential and this article provides a detailed literature survey of dynamic provisioning within cloud systems with focus on application performance. The well-known types of provisioning and the associated problems are clearly and pictorially explained and the provisioning terminology is clarified. A very detailed and general cloud provisioning classification is presented, which views provisioning from different perspectives, aiding in understanding the process inside-out. Cloud dynamic provisioning is explained by considering resources, stakeholders, techniques, technologies, algorithms, problems, goals and more.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

Multi-capacity combinatorial ordering GA in application to cloud resources allocation and efficient virtual machines consolidation

This paper describes a novel approach making use of genetic algorithms to find optimal solutions for multi-dimensional vector bin packing problems with the goal to improve cloud resource allocation and Virtual Machines (VMs) consolidation. Two algorithms, namely Combinatorial Ordering First-Fit Genetic Algorithm (COFFGA) and Combinatorial Ordering Next Fit Genetic Algorithm (CONFGA) have been developed for that and combined. The proposed hybrid algorithm targets to minimise the total number of running servers and resources wastage per server. The solutions obtained by the new algorithms are compared with latest solutions from literature. The results show that the proposed algorithm COFFGA outperforms other previous multi-dimension vector bin packing heuristics such as Permutation Pack (PP), First Fit (FF) and First Fit Decreasing (FFD) by 4%, 34%, and 39%, respectively. It also achieved better performance than the existing genetic algorithm for multi-capacity resources virtual machine consolidation (RGGA) in terms of performance and robustness. A thorough explanation for the improved performance of the newly proposed algorithm is given

A Survey on Load Balancing Algorithms for VM Placement in Cloud Computing

The emergence of cloud computing based on virtualization technologies brings huge opportunities to host virtual resource at low cost without the need of owning any infrastructure. Virtualization technologies enable users to acquire, configure and be charged on pay-per-use basis. However, Cloud data centers mostly comprise heterogeneous commodity servers hosting multiple virtual machines (VMs) with potential various specifications and fluctuating resource usages, which may cause imbalanced resource utilization within servers that may lead to performance degradation and service level agreements (SLAs) violations. To achieve efficient scheduling, these challenges should be addressed and solved by using load balancing strategies, which have been proved to be NP-hard problem. From multiple perspectives, this work identifies the challenges and analyzes existing algorithms for allocating VMs to PMs in infrastructure Clouds, especially focuses on load balancing. A detailed classification targeting load balancing algorithms for VM placement in cloud data centers is investigated and the surveyed algorithms are classified according to the classification. The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive and comparative understanding of existing literature and aid researchers by providing an insight for potential future enhancements.Comment: 22 Pages, 4 Figures, 4 Tables, in pres

Performance Controlled Power Optimization for Virtualized Internet Datacenters

Modern data centers must provide performance assurance for complex system software such as web applications. In addition, the power consumption of data centers needs to be minimized to reduce operating costs and avoid system overheating. In recent years, more and more data centers start to adopt server virtualization strategies for resource sharing to reduce hardware and operating costs by consolidating applications previously running on multiple physical servers onto a single physical server. In this dissertation, several power efficient algorithms are proposed to effectively reduce server power consumption while achieving the required application-level performance for virtualized servers. First, at the server level this dissertation proposes two control solutions based on dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technology and request batching technology. The two solutions share a performance balancing technique that maintains performance balancing among all virtual machines so that they can have approximately the same performance level relative to their allowed peak values. Then, when the workload intensity is light, we adopt the request batching technology by using a controller to determine the time length for periodically batching incoming requests and putting the processor into sleep mode. When the workload intensity changes from light to moderate, request batching is automatically switched to DVFS to increase the processor frequency for performance guarantees. Second, at the datacenter level, this dissertation proposes a performance-controlled power optimization solution for virtualized server clusters with multi-tier applications. The solution utilizes both DVFS and server consolidation strategies for maximized power savings by integrating feedback control with optimization strategies. At the application level, a multi-input-multi-output controller is designed to achieve the desired performance for applications spanning multiple VMs, on a short time scale, by reallocating the CPU resources and DVFS. At the cluster level, a power optimizer is proposed to incrementally consolidate VMs onto the most power-efficient servers on a longer time scale. Finally, this dissertation proposes a VM scheduling algorithm that exploits core performance heterogeneity to optimize the overall system energy efficiency. The four algorithms at the three different levels are demonstrated with empirical results on hardware testbeds and trace-driven simulations and compared against state-of-the-art baselines

Effective Resource and Workload Management in Data Centers

The increasing demand for storage, computation, and business continuity has driven the growth of data centers. Managing data centers efficiently is a difficult task because of the wide variety of datacenter applications, their ever-changing intensities, and the fact that application performance targets may differ widely. Server virtualization has been a game-changing technology for IT, providing the possibility to support multiple virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously. This dissertation focuses on how virtualization technologies can be utilized to develop new tools for maintaining high resource utilization, for achieving high application performance, and for reducing the cost of data center management.;For multi-tiered applications, bursty workload traffic can significantly deteriorate performance. This dissertation proposes an admission control algorithm AWAIT, for handling overloading conditions in multi-tier web services. AWAIT places on hold requests of accepted sessions and refuses to admit new sessions when the system is in a sudden workload surge. to meet the service-level objective, AWAIT serves the requests in the blocking queue with high priority. The size of the queue is dynamically determined according to the workload burstiness.;Many admission control policies are triggered by instantaneous measurements of system resource usage, e.g., CPU utilization. This dissertation first demonstrates that directly measuring virtual machine resource utilizations with standard tools cannot always lead to accurate estimates. A directed factor graph (DFG) model is defined to model the dependencies among multiple types of resources across physical and virtual layers.;Virtualized data centers always enable sharing of resources among hosted applications for achieving high resource utilization. However, it is difficult to satisfy application SLOs on a shared infrastructure, as application workloads patterns change over time. AppRM, an automated management system not only allocates right amount of resources to applications for their performance target but also adjusts to dynamic workloads using an adaptive model.;Server consolidation is one of the key applications of server virtualization. This dissertation proposes a VM consolidation mechanism, first by extending the fair load balancing scheme for multi-dimensional vector scheduling, and then by using a queueing network model to capture the service contentions for a particular virtual machine placement