A Power and Performance Management Simulation Platform for Web Application Server Cluster

Web application server cluster has been widely used to improve the performance of web application servers. Because web load is highly variable, we need to dynamically manage cluster’s deployment so as to reduce power consumption and meanwhile satisfy load performance demand. To facilitate researchers to evaluate a management strategy or choose key parameters for it, we propose a CloudSim-based simulation platform in this paper. It can simulate different cluster deployment algorithm, request scheduling algorithm and load feature, where cluster’s deployment includes the on/off state, CPU frequency and request scheduling parameter(s) of each server. By the aid of HookTimer component, the platform supports periodical and conditional deployment trigger modes, and can calculate some common performance indicators. The usage of interface, dynamic proxy technique and XML configuration file make the platform have good extensibility and configurability. In addition, a request-number-triggered management strategy is proposed and simulated by the platform. The simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the platform.