A Survey of the State-of-the-Art in Fair Multi-Resource Allocations for Data Centers

Multi-resource allocation in data centers determines a network and service management task of crucial importance. While, traditionally computing systems are shared based on a single resource, it was shown that in data centers this simplification often impedes overall efficiency and fairness. Therefore, newer approaches consider data center resource allocations as a multi-resource allocation problem. However, the capability of these approaches to reach overall fairness or efficiency is limited due to theoretical assumptions they make or due to practical means they deploy to control resources. This survey: 1) details all steps necessary to allocate data center resources and puts these steps in relation to each other; 2) highly relevant concepts in support of fair data center resource allocations, such as utility functions and allocation characteristics, are discussed and compared; and 3) in turn, major approaches to allocate multiple data center resources in a fair manner are outlined, mapped to practical steps and economically driven-targets, and compared with respect to their suitability of being applied in today’s data centers.