Power and Performance Management of Virtualized Computing Environments Via Lookahead Control

— There is growing incentive to reduce the power consumed by large-scale data centers that host online services such as banking, retail commerce, and gaming. Virtualization is a promising approach to consolidating multiple online services onto a smaller number of computing resources. A virtualized server environment allows computing resources to be shared among multiple performance-isolated platforms called virtual machines. By dynamically provisioning virtual machines, consolidating the workload, and turning servers on and off as needed, data center operators can maintain the desired quality-of-service (QoS) while achieving higher server utilization and energy efficiency. We implement and validate a dynamic resource provisioning framework for virtualized server environments wherein the provisioning problem is posed as one of sequential optimization under uncertainty and solved using a lookahead control scheme. The proposed approach accounts for the switching costs incurred while pr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICAC
• Authors: Dara Kusic, Jeffrey O. Kephart, James E. Hanson, Nagarajan Kandasamy, Guofei Jiang
• Keywords: Autonomic Computing, ICAC 2008, Provisioning, Virtual Machines, Virtualized Server Environments