Towards workload-aware virtual machine consolidation on cloud platforms

As the cloud markets grow, the cloud providers are faced with new challenges such as reduction of power consumption and guaranteeing service level agreements (SLAs). One reason for these problems is the use of server consolidation policy based on virtualization for maximizing the efficiency of resource usage. Because current virtualization technologies do not ensure performance isolation among active virtual machines (VMs), it is required to consider resource usage pattern of VMs to improve total throughput and quality of service. In this paper, we propose a new consolidation policy which exploits per-VM resource usage monitoring techniques. Specifically, we focus on the performance impact of contention in a last-level shared cache (LLC). Through our experiments, we have found that the ratio of LLC reference is highly associated with cache demand, and a throughput-maximizing VM consolidation policy can be devised by using the ratio.