CSR: PDOS: RIVER: Resource Management Infrastructure for Consolidated Hosting in Virtualized Data Centers

The recent resurgence of research in server virtualization

has created a lot of interest among providers of large-scale

data centers in employing this technology to design improved

solutions for managed hosting. Virtualization holds the promise of increased

degrees of resource consolidation with accompanying reduction in

operational costs of administration, repair, and electricity.

Designing efficient virtualized data centers

is therefore a desirable and worthy endeavor in multiple ways.

The transition from traditional hosting models

to a virtualized model is, however, not a trivial one. Realizing

the consolidation-related benefits that virtualization has to

offer requires a re-consideration of: (i) schedulers within the VMM,

(ii) mechanisms for resource usage monitoring and accounting, and

(iii) system-wide dynamic resource provisioning mechanisms.

This proposal identifies the key challenges that arise on

all these fronts in a virtualized data center, and

develops a comprehensive solution, called River, to address them.

River will make the following specific contributions: (i) improved

resource management algorithms

within the virtual machine monitor (VMM) that use both

horizontal (between the schedulers in the VMM) and vertical

(between VMM and hosted OS schedulers) co-operation,

(ii) efficient and stable dynamic resource provisioning, and

(iii) systems primitives that would provide new opportunities

to the provisioning algorithms for improved cost-cutting via

reduction of virtualization overheads. A prototype River data center based

on Xen will be developed and resulting code

made available to the community. Finally, we will

re-design the labs associated with the systems courses at Penn State to

employ virtualized hosting of class projects.