Scalable Traffic-Aware Virtual Machine Management for Cloud Data Centers

Virtual Machine (VM) management is a powerful mechanism for providing elastic services over Cloud Data Centers (DC)s. At the same time, the resulting network congestion has been repeatedly reported as the main bottleneck in DCs, even when the overall resource utilization of the infrastructure remains low. However, most current VM management strategies are traffic-agnostic, while the few that are traffic-aware only concern a static initial allocation, ignore bandwidth oversubscription, or do not scale. In this paper we present S-CORE, a scalable VM migration algorithm to dynamically reallocate VMs to servers while minimizing the overall communication footprint of active traffic flows. We formulate the aggregate VM communication as an optimization problem and we then define a novel distributed migration scheme that iteratively adapts to dynamic traffic changes. Through extensive simulation and implementation results, we show that S-CORE achieves significant (up to 87%) communication cost reduction while incurring minimal overhead and downtime. Index Terms—Virtual Machine, Migration, Consolidation, Communication Cost, Scalable, Traffic-Aware, Data Center Networ

SDN-based Virtual Machine Management for Cloud Data Centers

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm to logically centralize the network control plane and automate the configuration of individual network elements. At the same time, in Cloud Data Centers (DCs), even though network and server resources converge over the same infrastructure and typically under a single administrative entity, disjoint control mechanisms are used for their respective management. In this paper, we propose a unified server-network control mechanism for converged ICT environments. We present a SDN-based orchestration framework for live Virtual Machine (VM) management where server hypervisors exploit temporal network information to migrate VMs and minimize the network-wide communication cost of the resulting traffic dynamics. A prototype implementation is presented and Mininet is used to evaluate the impact of diverse orchestration algorithms

SDN-based Virtual Machine Management for Cloud Data Centers

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm to logically centralize the network control plane and automate the configuration of individual network elements. At the same time, in Cloud Data Centers (DCs), although network and server resources are collocated and managed by a single administrative entity, disjoint control mechanisms are used for their respective management. In this article, we propose a unified server-network resource management for such converged Information and Communication Technology (ICT) environments. We present a SDN-based orchestration framework for live Virtual Machine (VM) management that exploits temporal network information to migrate VMs and minimize the network-wide communication cost of the resulting traffic dynamics. A prototype implementation is presented, and a Cloud DC testbed is used to evaluate the impact of diverse orchestration algorithms. Our live VM management has been shown to reduce the network-wide communication cost, especially for the high-cost and congestionprone core and aggregation layers of the DC. Our results show an increase in network-wide throughput by over 6 times, as well as over 70% communication cost reduction by migrating less than 50% of the VMs

Network and Server Resource Management Strategies for Data Centre Infrastructures: A Survey

The advent of virtualisation and the increasing demand for outsourced, elastic compute charged on a pay-as-you-use basis has stimulated the development of large-scale Cloud Data Centres (DCs) housing tens of thousands of computer clusters. Of the signi�cant capital outlay required for building and operating such infrastructures, server and network equipment account for 45% and 15% of the total cost, respectively, making resource utilisation e�ciency paramount in order to increase the operators' Return-on-Investment (RoI). In this paper, we present an extensive survey on the management of server and network resources over virtualised Cloud DC infrastructures, highlighting key concepts and results, and critically discussing their limitations and implications for future research opportunities. We highlight the need for and bene �ts of adaptive resource provisioning that alleviates reliance on static utilisation prediction models and exploits direct measurement of resource utilisation on servers and network nodes. Coupling such distributed measurement with logically-centralised Software De�ned Networking (SDN) principles, we subsequently discuss the challenges and opportunities for converged resource management over converged ICT environments, through unifying control loops to globally orchestrate adaptive and load-sensitive resource provisioning

PLAN: Joint Policy- and Network-Aware VM Management for Cloud Data Centers

Policies play an important role in network configuration and therefore in offering secure and high performance services especially over multi-tenant Cloud Data Center (DC)environments. At the same time, elastic resource provisioning through virtualization often disregards policy requirements, assuming that the policy implementation is handled by the underlying network infrastructure. This can result in policy violations, performance degradation and security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we define PLAN, a PoLicy-Aware and Network-aware VM management scheme to jointly consider DC communication cost reduction through Virtual Machine (VM) migration while meeting network policy requirements. We show that the problem is NP-hard and derive an efficient approximate algorithm to reduce communication cost while adhering to policy constraints. Through extensive evaluation, we show that PLAN can reduce topology-wide communication cost by 38% over diverse aggregate traffic and configuration policies

PLAN: A Policy-Aware VM Management Scheme for Cloud Data Centres

Policies play an important role in network configuration and therefore in offering secure and high performance services especially over multi-tenant Cloud Data Center (DC) environments. At the same time, elastic resource provisioning through virtualization often disregards policy requirements, assuming that the policy implementation is handled by the underlying network infrastructure. This can result in policy violations, performance degradation and security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we define PLAN, a PoLicy-Aware virtual machine maNagement scheme to jointly consider DC communication cost reduction through Virtual Machine (VM) migration while meeting network policy requirements. We show that the problem is NP-hard and derive an efficient approximate algorithm to reduce communication cost while adhering to policy constraints. Through extensive evaluation, we show that PLAN can reduce topology-wide communication cost by 38% over diverse aggregate traffic and configuration policies

Policy-Aware Virtual Machine Management in Data Center Networks

Policies play an important role in network configuration and, therefore, in offering secure and high performance services, especially over multi-tenant Cloud Data Center (DC) environments. At the same time, elastic resource provisioning through virtualization often disregards policy requirements, assuming that the policy implementation is handled by the underlying network infrastructure. In this paper, we define PLAN, a Policy-Aware virtual machine management scheme to jointly consider DC communication cost reduction through Virtual Machine (VM) migration while meeting network policy requirements

Synergistic Policy and Virtual Machine Consolidation in Cloud Data Centers

In modern Cloud Data Centers (DC)s, correct implementation of network policies is crucial to provide secure, efficient and high performance services for tenants. It is reported that the inefficient management of network policies accounts for 78% of DC downtime, challenged by the dynamically changing network characteristics and by the effects of dynamic Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation. While there has been significant research in policy and VM management, they have so far been treated as disjoint research problems. In this paper, we explore the simultaneous, dynamic VM and policy consolidation, and formulate the Policy-VM Consolidation (PVC) problem, which is shown to be NP-Hard. We then propose Sync, an efficient and synergistic scheme to jointly consolidate net- work policies and virtual machines. Extensive evaluation results and a testbed implementation of our controller show that policy and VM migration under Sync significantly reduces flow end- to-end delay by nearly 40%, and network-wide communication cost by 50% within few seconds, while adhering strictly to the requirements of network policies