A Toolkit for Modeling and Simulation of Real-Time Virtual Machine Allocation in a Cloud Data Center

Resource scheduling in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is one of the keys for large-scale Cloud applications. Extensive research on all issues in real environment is extremely difficult because it requires developers to consider network infrastructure and the environment, which may be beyond the control. In addition, the network conditions cannot be predicted or controlled. Therefore, performance evaluation of workload models and Cloud provisioning algorithms in a repeatable manner under different configurations and requirements is difficult. There is still lack of tools that enable developers to compare different resource scheduling algorithms in IaaS regarding both computing servers and user workloads. To fill this gap in tools for evaluation and modeling of Cloud environments and applications, we propose CloudSched. CloudSched can help developers identify and explore appropriate solutions considering different resource scheduling algorithms. Unlike traditional scheduling algorithms considering only one factor such as CPU, which can cause hotspots or bottlenecks in many cases, CloudSched treats multidimensional resource such as CPU, memory and network bandwidth integrated for both physical machines and virtual machines (VMs) for different scheduling objectives (algorithms). In this paper, two existing simulation systems at application level for Cloud computing are studied, a novel lightweight simulation system is proposed for real-time VM scheduling in Cloud data centers, and results by applying the proposed simulation system are analyzed and discussed.