Responding Rapidly to Service Level Violations Using Virtual Appliances
Date
December 15, 2012
Author
Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, Gokul Soundararajan, Vipul Mathur, Kaladhar Voruganti, and Kiran Srinivasan.
In this position paper, we propose dynamic instantiation of virtual machines with storage functionality as a mechanism to meet storage SLOs efficiently.
One of the key goals in the data center today is providing storage services with service-level objectives (SLOs) for performance metrics such as latency and throughput. Meeting such SLOs is challenging due to the dynamism observed in these environments. In this position paper, we propose dynamic instantiation of virtual appliances, that is, virtual machines with storage functionality, as a mechanism to meet storage SLOs efficiently.
In order for dynamic instantiation to be realistic for rapidly-changing environments, it should be automated. Therefore, an important goal of this paper is to show that such automation is feasible. We do so through a caching case study. Specifically, we build the automation framework for dynamically instantiating virtual caching appliances. This framework identifies sets of interfering workloads that can benefit from caching, determines the cache-size requirements of workloads, non-disruptively migrates the application to use the cache, and warms the cache to quickly return to acceptable service levels. We show through an experiment that this approach addresses SLO violations while using resources efficiently.
In ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Vol. 46, No. 3, December 2012, pp. 32-40
Resources
A copy of the paper is attached to this posting.
The definitive version of the paper can be found at: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2421648.2421654.
