Abstract

Virtualization can provide significant benefits in data centers by enabling virtual machine migration to eliminate hotspots. We have developed Sandpiper, a system that automates the task of monitoring and detecting hotspots, determining a new mapping of physical to virtual resources and initiating the 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 implemented our techniques in Xen and conducted 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 20 seconds and scales well to larger, data center environments.

System Architecture Nucleus: Monitors resource utilization of each VM Hotspot Detector: Detects when a hotspot occurs Profiling Engine: Decides how many resources to allocate Migration Manager: Determines where to migrate Participants Timothy Wood Prashant Shenoy Arun Venkataramani Mazin Yousif (Intel)

Black-box and Gray-box Strategies for Virtual Machine Migration

Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, Arun Venkataramani and Mazin Yousif. Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Cambridge, MA, April 2007.
Paper - Slides

Sandpiper

This release includes the software used for our NSDI 2007 paper. It includes a Xen specific resource monitoring component and a control plane which makes resource allocation and migration decisions. It is released under the GPL v2. Note: This code should be considered a research prototype, not a stable or complete release. It will likely require significant tweaking and configuration for your setup.

• Release Notes
• Source Code
• Patched Xen 3.0.2