Memory resource management in VMware ESX server
OSDI '02 Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementationCopyright restrictions prevent ACM from being able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading
SARC: sequential prefetching in adaptive replacement cache
ATEC '05 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
DiskSeen: exploiting disk layout and access history to enhance I/O prefetch
ATC'07 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference on Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Dynamic memory balancing for virtual machines
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
FAST: quick application launch on solid-state drives
FAST'11 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on File and stroage technologies
Saving cash by using less cache
HotCloud'12 Proceedings of the 4th USENIX conference on Hot Topics in Cloud Ccomputing
nsdi'13 Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
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Data center servers are typically overprovisioned, leaving spare memory and CPU capacity idle to handle unpredictable workload bursts by the virtual machines running on them [1, 2, 3]. While this allows for fast hotspot mitigation, it is also wasteful. Unfortunately, making use of spare capacity without impacting active applications is particularly difficult for memory since it typically must be allocated in coarse chunks over long timescales [4, 5, 6, 7]. In this work we propose repurposing the poorly utilized memory in a data center to store a volatile data store that is managed by the hypervisor. We present two uses for our Mortar framework: as a cache for prefetching disk blocks [8, 9, 10], and as an application-level distributed cache that follows the memcached protocol [11, 12]. Both prototypes use the framework to ask the hypervisor to store useful, but recoverable data within its free memory pool. This allows the hypervisor to control eviction policies and prioritize access to the cache.