VMware Academic Research Symposium

The slides from a talk on online model-based performance and resource management in virtualized environments by Samuel Kounev at the 2013 VMware Academic Research Symposium are available for download. The symposium, which attracted more than 120 researchers from industry and academia, took place on July 17-18, 2013 at the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California.

Details:

Title: Online model-based performance and resource management in virtualized application environments

Abstract:

Modern IT systems are increasingly deployed on virtualized infrastructures for maximum flexibility and cost efficiency. To reduce operating costs and improve energy efficiency, resource allocations need to be continuously optimized while ensuring that the hosted IT services meet their service-level agreements (SLAs). Unfortunately, existing tools for performance and resource management of virtualized infrastructures lack the ability to proactively determine the effects of changing resource allocations on the performance of hosted IT services. In this talk, we give an overview of our ongoing work on developing novel techniques for online model-based performance and resource management in virtualized environments based on the VMware vSphere hypervisor. Our approach uses analytical and simulation-based performance models to predict the performance of applications hosted in the virtualized environment for a given workload and resource allocation. The models are inferred automatically during operation and are analyzed on-the-fly to predict the effects of dynamic changes in the environment. The online prediction is leveraged to continuously optimize resource allocations maximizing resource efficiency while ensuring SLA compliance. The modeling approach used in this project is based on the Descartes Meta-Model (DMM) - a new architecture-level modeling language for modeling quality-of-service and resource management related aspects of modern dynamic IT systems, infrastructures and services.