Dynamic Virtual Machine Scheduling in Clouds for Architectural Shared Resources

Abstract

Although virtual machine (VM) migration has been used to avoid conflicts on traditional system resources like CPU and memory, micro-architectural resources such as shared caches, memory controllers, and nonuniform memory access (NUMA) affinity, have only relied on intra-system scheduling to reduce contentions on them. This study shows that live VM migration can be used to mitigate the contentions on micro-architectural resources. Such cloud-level VM scheduling can widen the scope of VM selections for architectural shared resources beyond a single system, and thus improve the opportunity to further reduce possible conflicts. This paper proposes and evaluates two cluster-level virtual machine scheduling techniques for cache sharing and NUMA affinity, which do not require any prior knowledge on the behaviors of VMs.