7,812 research outputs found
Virtual Machines and Networks - Installation, Performance Study, Advantages and Virtualization Options
The interest in virtualization has been growing rapidly in the IT industry
because of inherent benefits like better resource utilization and ease of
system manageability. The experimentation and use of virtualization as well as
the simultaneous deployment of virtual software are increasingly getting
popular and in use by educational institutions for research and teaching. This
paper stresses on the potential advantages associated with virtualization and
the use of virtual machines for scenarios, which cannot be easily implemented
and/or studied in a traditional academic network environment, but need to be
explored and experimented by students to meet the raising needs and
knowledge-base demanded by the IT industry. In this context, we discuss various
aspects of virtualization - starting from the working principle of virtual
machines, installation procedure for a virtual guest operating system on a
physical host operating system, virtualization options and a performance study
measuring the throughput obtained on a network of virtual machines and physical
host machines. In addition, the paper extensively evaluates the use of virtual
machines and virtual networks in an academic environment and also specifically
discusses sample projects on network security, which may not be feasible enough
to be conducted in a physical network of personal computers; but could be
conducted only using virtual machines
CloudScope: diagnosing and managing performance interference in multi-tenant clouds
© 2015 IEEE.Virtual machine consolidation is attractive in cloud computing platforms for several reasons including reduced infrastructure costs, lower energy consumption and ease of management. However, the interference between co-resident workloads caused by virtualization can violate the service level objectives (SLOs) that the cloud platform guarantees. Existing solutions to minimize interference between virtual machines (VMs) are mostly based on comprehensive micro-benchmarks or online training which makes them computationally intensive. In this paper, we present CloudScope, a system for diagnosing interference for multi-tenant cloud systems in a lightweight way. CloudScope employs a discrete-time Markov Chain model for the online prediction of performance interference of co-resident VMs. It uses the results to optimally (re)assign VMs to physical machines and to optimize the hypervisor configuration, e.g. the CPU share it can use, for different workloads. We have implemented CloudScope on top of the Xen hypervisor and conducted experiments using a set of CPU, disk, and network intensive workloads and a real system (MapReduce). Our results show that CloudScope interference prediction achieves an average error of 9%. The interference-aware scheduler improves VM performance by up to 10% compared to the default scheduler. In addition, the hypervisor reconfiguration can improve network throughput by up to 30%
On the Benefit of Virtualization: Strategies for Flexible Server Allocation
Virtualization technology facilitates a dynamic, demand-driven allocation and
migration of servers. This paper studies how the flexibility offered by network
virtualization can be used to improve Quality-of-Service parameters such as
latency, while taking into account allocation costs. A generic use case is
considered where both the overall demand issued for a certain service (for
example, an SAP application in the cloud, or a gaming application) as well as
the origins of the requests change over time (e.g., due to time zone effects or
due to user mobility), and we present online and optimal offline strategies to
compute the number and location of the servers implementing this service. These
algorithms also allow us to study the fundamental benefits of dynamic resource
allocation compared to static systems. Our simulation results confirm our
expectations that the gain of flexible server allocation is particularly high
in scenarios with moderate dynamics
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