What will happen if cloud management operations burst out?

Currently, cloud data centers make use of server virtualization techniques that consolidate computational resources to provide various services and improve resource utilization. However, the pattern of resource usage in some management operations for virtualized systems, such as live migration and snapshot recording, is different from that in the case of a traditional data center in which the virtualization technology is not used. Therefore, understanding the system behavior during the execution of a large number of management operations is very important for the reliable management of a virtualized cloud data center. With this understanding, we studied the characteristics of management operation performance by executing many operations simultaneously in an experimental virtual server system. The experimental results revealed some notable characteristics, including interference between operations with virtual machines (VMs) hosted on different physical servers and the asymmetric nature of live migration. On the basis of these findings, we state that degradation of operation performance can be mitigated by orchestrating operations under a proper control policy. We confirm the validity of these suggestions by carrying out a case study.