Technical Reports
HPL-2008-122
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Predicting Application Resource Requirements in Virtual Environments
Wood, Timothy; Cherkasova, Ludmila; Ozonat, Kivanc; Shenoy, Prashant
HP Laboratories
HPL-2008-122
Keyword(s): virtualization, application resource usage, benchmarking, modeling, automation, performance models, regression-based approach
Abstract: Next Generation Data Centers (NGDC) are transforming labor-intensive, hard-coded, siloed systems into shared, virtualized, automated, and fully managed adaptive infrastructures. Virtualization technologies promise great opportunities for reducing energy and hardware costs through server consolidation. Moreover, virtualization can optimize resource sharing among applications hosted in different virtual machines to better meet their resource needs. However, to safely transition an application running natively on real hardware to a virtualized environment, one needs to estimate the additional resource requirements incurred by virtualization overheads. In this work, we design a general approach for estimating the resource requirements of applications when they are transferred to a virtual environment. Our approach has two key components: a set of microbenchmarks to profile the different types of virtualization overhead on a given platform, and a regression-based model that maps the native system usage profile into a virtualized one. This derived model can be used for estimating resource requirements of any application to be virtualized on a given platform. Our approach aims to eliminate error- prone manual processes and presents a fully automated solution. We illustrate the effectiveness of our methodology using Xen virtual machine monitor. Our evaluation shows that our automated model generation procedure effectively characterizes the different virtualization overheads of two diverse hardware platforms and that the models have median prediction error of less than 5% for both the RUBiS and TPC-W benchmarks.
26 Pages
Additional Publication Information: To be published in Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 9th International Middleware Conference (Middleware'2008), Leuven, Belgium, December 1-5, 2008
External Posting Date: October 6, 2008 [Fulltext]. Approved for External Publication
Internal Posting Date: October 6, 2008 [Fulltext]