An efficient virtual CPU scheduling in cloud computing

In cloud computing, fine-grained virtual CPU scheduling techniques are essential in hiding physical resources from running applications and mitigating the decrease in performance upon virtualization. However, evaluating and predicting the behaviors of virtual processors is getting harder because of the diverse QoS requirements of cloud applications. In this paper, we propose a novel virtual CPU scheduling scheme to provide a high I/O performance for cloud applications. We present an evaluation function that evaluates the task characteristics of virtual machines by observing the amount of resource consumption of each virtual processor. Based on the evaluation function, the proposed scheduling scheme controls the priorities of virtual machines adaptively for fair distribution in handling I/O requests. Because our scheme evaluates both CPU-intensiveness and I/O-intensiveness of virtual machines, it provides high performance in terms of responsiveness even for various types of tasks. We implemented and experimented the proposed scheme on a virtual machine monitor. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme increases the responsiveness and I/O bandwidth of virtual machines.