PAVM: a framework for policy‐aware virtual machine management

The problem of efficient placement of virtual machines (VMs) in cloud computing infrastructure is well studied in the literature. VM placement decision involves selecting a physical machine in the data center to host a specific VM. This decision could play a pivotal role in yielding high efficiency for both the cloud and its users. Also, reallocation of VMs could be performed through migrations to achieve goals like higher server consolidation or power saving. VM placement and reallocation decisions may consider affinities such as memory sharing, CPU processing, disk sharing, and network bandwidth requirements between VMs defined in multiple dimensions. Considering the NP‐hard complexity associated with computing an optimal solution for this VM placement decision problem, existing research employs heuristic‐based techniques to compute an efficient solution. However, most of these approaches are restricted to only a single attribute at a time. That is, a given technique of using heuristics to compute VM placement considers only a single attribute, while completely ignoring the impact of other dimensions of placing VMs. While this approach may improve the efficiency with respect to the affinity attribute in consideration, it may yield degraded performance with respect to other affinities. In addition, the criteria for determining VM‐placement efficiency may vary for different applications. Hence, the overall goal of achieving VM placement efficiency becomes difficult and challenging. We are motivated by this challenging problem of efficient VM placement and propose policy‐aware virtual machine management (PAVM), a generic framework that can be used for efficient VM management in a cloud computing platform based on the service provider‐defined policies to achieve the desired system‐wide goals. This involves efficient means to profile different VM affinities and to use profiled information effectively by intelligent and efficient VM migrations at run time considering multiple attributes at a time. By conducting extensive evaluation through simulation and real experiments that involve VM affinities on the basis of network and memory, we confirmed that the PAVM architecture is capable of improving the efficiency of a cloud system. We elaborate the architecture of a PAVM system, describe its implementation, and present details of our experiments. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.