Revenue Driven Resource Allocation for Virtualized Data Centers

The increasing VM density in cloud hosting services makes careful management of physical resources such as CPU, memory, and I/O bandwidth within individual virtualized servers a priority. To maximize cost-efficiency, resource management needs to be coupled with the revenue generating mechanisms of cloud hosting: the service level agreements (SLAs) of hosted client applications. In this paper, we develop a server resource management framework that reduces data center resource management complexity substantially. Our solution implements revenue-driven dynamic resource allocation which continuously steers the resource distribution across hosted VMs within a server such as to maximize the SLA-generated revenue from the server. Our experimental evaluation for a VMware ESX hyper visor highlights the importance of both resource isolation and resource sharing across VMs. The empirical data shows a 7%-54% increase in total revenue generated for a mix of 10-25 VMs hosting either similar or diverse workloads when compared to using the currently available resource distribution mechanisms in ESX.