Sandpiper: Black-box and gray-box resource management for virtual machines

  • Authors:

  • Timothy Wood;Prashant Shenoy;Arun Venkataramani;Mazin Yousif

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Massachusetts, Dept. of Computer Science, 140 Governor's Drive, Amherst, MA 01003, United States;University of Massachusetts, Dept. of Computer Science, 140 Governor's Drive, Amherst, MA 01003, United States;University of Massachusetts, Dept. of Computer Science, 140 Governor's Drive, Amherst, MA 01003, United States;Avirtec, 1236 E. Grant Road, Tucson, AZ 85719, United States

  • Venue:
  • Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Virtualization can provide significant benefits in data centers by enabling dynamic virtual machine resizing and migration to eliminate hotspots. We present Sandpiper, a system that automates the task of monitoring and detecting hotspots, determining a new mapping of physical to virtual resources, resizing virtual machines to their new allocations, and initiating any necessary migrations. Sandpiper implements a black-box approach that is fully OS- and application-agnostic and a gray-box approach that exploits OS- and application-level statistics. We implement our techniques in Xen and conduct a detailed evaluation using a mix of CPU, network and memory-intensive applications. Our results show that Sandpiper is able to resolve single server hotspots within 20s and scales well to larger, data center environments. We also show that the gray-box approach can help Sandpiper make more informed decisions, particularly in response to memory pressure.