Replication and Migration as Resource Management Mechanisms for Virtualized Environments

Virtualization has become an essential technology in the data center. Virtualization improves resource utilization through server consolidation, but it also makes resource management more complex. Golondrina, an autonomic resource management system, was built to use virtual machine relocation to handle resource stress situations, that is, situations where the combined resource needs of the virtual machines hosted in a physical machine exceed the resource availability. Preliminary experiments show that replication offers improvements over migration, and both mechanisms offer improvements over taking no action upon detection of a resource stress situation. This work is one of the first ones in proposing a resource management system for operating system-level virtualized environments. Moreover, this is the first study that uses replication as an alternative to migration and compares both mechanisms.