Self-Adaptive Capacity Management for Multi-Tier Virtualized Environments

This paper addresses the problem of hosting multiple applications on a provider´s virtualized multi-tier infrastructure. Building from a previous model, we design a new self-adaptive capacity management framework, which combines a two-level SLA-driven pricing model, an optimization model and an analytical queuing-based performance model to maximize the provider´s business objective. Our main contributions are the more accurate multi-queue performance model, which captures application specific bottlenecks and the parallelism inherent to multi-tier platforms, as well as the solution of the extended and much more complex optimization model. Our approach is evaluated via simulation with synthetic as well as realistic workloads, in various scenarios. The results show that our solution is significantly more cost-effective, in terms of the provider´s achieved revenues, than the approach it is built upon, which uses a single-resource performance model. It also significantly outperforms a multi-tier static allocation strategy for heavy and unbalanced workloads. Finally, preliminary experiments assess the applicability of our framework to virtualized environments subjected to capacity variations caused by the processing of management and security-related tasks.