cCluster: A Core Clustering Mechanism for Workload-Aware Virtual Machine Scheduling

In spite of the fact that Cloud Computing Environments (CCE) host many I/O intensive applications such as Web services, big data and virtual desktops, virtual machine monitors like Xen impose high overhead on CCEs´ delivered performance hosting such applications. Studies have shown that hypervisors such as Xen favor compute intensive workloads while their performance for I/O intensive tasks is far from satisfactory. In this paper we present a new mechanism called cCluster to mitigate I/O processing delay in CCEs. To this end, cCluster classifies running virtual machines into I/O and computation VMs, and based on this classification, it dynamically classifies exiting physical cores into I/O and computation cores too. It then schedules I/O virtual CPUs (vCPU) on I/O cores and computation vCPUs on computation cores. Empirical results demonstrate that cCluster remarkably reduces the I/O response time and thus improves the network throughput.