Decision support for virtual machine re-provisioning in production environments
Kyrre Begnum, Matthew Disney, Æleen Frisch · 2008
Management of virtual machines (VMs) on a large scale remains a significant challenge today. We lack general and vendor-independent quantitative crite-ria/metrics by which to describe the state of infras-tructures for virtualization. This data is essential to both expressing administrative policy goals and to measure ongoing compliance with them in pro-duction settings. In this work, we consider VM management in production environments. We investigate VM ap-plicability to real-world scientific computing prob-lems by comparing application performance in a controlled environment of physical servers with the Manage Large Networks (MLN) tool’s implemen-tation of the same scenario on virtual machines. Based on our observations, we propose three new metrics by which to describe and analyze the in-frastructure in order to incorporate virtual machine management closer into policy. The metrics have been implemented into the latest release of our MLN tool for virtual machine management. 1