Self-adaptive and self-configured CPU resource provisioning for virtualized servers using Kalman filters

• Authors: Evangelia Kalyvianaki;Themistoklis Charalambous;Steven Hand
• Venue: ICAC '09 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Autonomic computing
• Year: 2009

Data center virtualization allows cost-effective server consolidation which can increase system throughput and reduce power consumption. Resource management of virtualized servers is an important and challenging task, especially when dealing with fluctuating workloads and complex multi-tier server applications. Recent results in control theory-based resource management have shown the potential benefits of adjusting allocations to match changing workloads. This paper presents a new resource management scheme that integrates the Kalman filter into feedback controllers to dynamically allocate CPU resources to virtual machines hosting server applications. The novelty of our approach is the use of the Kalman filter-the optimal filtering technique for state estimation in the sum of squares sense-to track the CPU utilizations and update the allocations accordingly. Our basic controllers continuously detect and self-adapt to unforeseen workload intensity changes. Our more advanced controller self-configures itself to any workload condition without any a priori information. Indicatively, it results in within 4.8% of the performance of workload-aware controllers under high intensity workload changes, and performs equally well under medium intensity traffic. In addition, our controllers are enhanced to deal with multi-tier server applications: by using the pair-wise resource coupling between application components, they provide a 3% on average server performance improvement when facing large unexpected workload increases when compared to controllers with no such resource-coupling mechanism. We evaluate our techniques by controlling a 3-tier Rubis benchmark web site deployed on a prototype Xen-virtualized cluster.