Temporal isolation among virtual machines

About: Temporal isolation among virtual machines is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1884 publications have been published within this topic receiving 59572 citations.

SLA-Aware Virtual Resource Management for Cloud Infrastructures

Abstract: Cloud platforms host several independent applications on a shared resource pool with the ability to allocate computing power to applications on a per-demand basis. The use of server virtualization techniques for such platforms provide great flexibility with the ability to consolidate several virtual machines on the same physical server, to resize a virtual machine capacity and to migrate virtual machine across physical servers. A key challenge for cloud providers is to automate the management of virtual servers while taking into account both high-level QoS requirements of hosted applications and resource management costs. This paper proposes an autonomic resource manager to control the virtualized environment which decouples the provisioning of resources from the dynamic placement of virtual machines. This manager aims to optimize a global utility function which integrates both the degree of SLA fulfillment and the operating costs. We resort to a Constraint Programming approach to formulate and solve the optimization problem. Results obtained through simulations validate our approach.

Performance isolation and fairness for multi-tenant cloud storage

Abstract: Shared storage services enjoy wide adoption in commercial clouds. But most systems today provide weak performance isolation and fairness between tenants, if at all. Misbehaving or high-demand tenants can overload the shared service and disrupt other well-behaved tenants, leading to unpredictable performance and violating SLAs.This paper presents Pisces, a system for achieving datacenter-wide per-tenant performance isolation and fairness in shared key-value storage. Today's approaches for multi-tenant resource allocation are based either on per-VM allocations or hard rate limits that assume uniform workloads to achieve high utilization. Pisces achieves per-tenant weighted fair shares (or minimal rates) of the aggregate resources of the shared service, even when different tenants' partitions are co-located and when demand for different partitions is skewed, time-varying, or bottlenecked by different server resources. Pisces does so by decomposing the fair sharing problem into a combination of four complementary mechanisms--partition placement, weight allocation, replica selection, and weighted fair queuing--that operate on different time-scales and combine to provide system-wide max-min fairness.An evaluation of our Pisces storage prototype achieves nearly ideal (0.99 Min-Max Ratio) weighted fair sharing, strong performance isolation, and robustness to skew and shifts in tenant demand. These properties are achieved with minimal overhead (

Optimizing application performance on virtual machines automatically with end-user preferences

Abstract: A virtual machine management/monitoring service can be configured to automatically monitor and implement user-defined (e.g., administrator-defined) configuration policies with respect to virtual machine and application resource utilization. In one implementation, the monitoring service can be extended to provide user-customized alerts based on various particularly defined events that occur (e.g., some memory or processing threshold) during operation of the virtual machines and/or application execution. The user can also specify particularly tailored solutions, which can include automatically reallocating physical host resources without additional user input on a given physical host, or moving/adding virtual machines on other physical hosts. For example, the monitoring service can be configured so that, upon identifying that a virtual machine's memory and processing resources are maxed out and/or growing, the monitoring service adds memory or processing resources for the virtual machine, or adds a new virtual machine to handle the load for the application program.

Formal requirements for virtualizable third generation architectures

Abstract: Virtual machine systems have been implemented on a limited number of third generation computer systems, for example CP-67 on the IBM 360/67. The value of virtual machine techniques to ease the development of operating systems, to aid in program transferability, and to allow the concurrent running of disparate operating systems, test and diagnostic programs has been well recognized. However, from previous empirical studies, it is known that many third generation computer systems, e.g. the DEC PDP-10, cannot support a virtual machine system.In this paper, the hardware architectural requirements for virtual machine systems are discussed. First, a fairly specific definition of a virtual machine is presented which includes the aspects of efficiency, isolation, and identical behavior. A model of third generation-like computer systems is then developed. The model includes a processor with supervisor and user modes, memory that has a simple protection mechanism, and a trap facility. In this context, instruction behavior is then carefully characterized.

Systems and methods for performing backup operations of virtual machine files

Abstract: Backup systems and methods are disclosed for a virtual computing environment Certain examples include a system having a backup management server that communicates with a host server having at least one virtual machine The management server coordinates with the host server to perform backup copies of entire virtual machine disks from outside the guest operating system of the virtual machine In certain examples, such backup systems further utilize a volume shadow copy service executing on the host server to quiesce virtual machine applications to put data in a consistent state to be backed up The backup system then utilizes hypervisor snapshot capabilities of the host server to record intended changes to the virtual machine disk files while such files are being copied (eg, backed up) by the host server Such recorded changes can be later committed to the virtual machine disk files once the backup operation has completed