Dynamic Load Balancing of Virtual Machines Hosted on Xen

DYNAMIC LOAD BALANCING OF VIRTUAL MACHINES HOSTED ON XEN Terry C. Wilcox Jr. Department of Computer Science Master of Science Currently systems of virtual machines are load balanced statically which can create load imbalances for systems where the load changes dynamically over time. For throughput and response time of a system to be maximized it is necessary for load to be evenly distributed among each part of the system. We implement a prototype policy engine for the Xen virtual machine monitor which can dynamically load balance virtual machines. We compare the throughput and response time of our system using the cpu2000 and the WEB2005 benchmarks from SPEC. Under the loads we tested, dynamic load balancing had 5%-8% higher throughput than static load balancing.

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