Partial coscheduling of virtual machines based on memory access patterns
Anselm Busse, Jan Hendrik Schönherr, Matthias Diener, Philippe O. A. Navaux, Hans-Ulrich Heiß · 2015
Virtualization is omnipresent in server environments. The scheduling of virtual machines is a challenging task because it is necessary to avoid differences in processing progress of the virtual CPUs, which otherwise can lead to a severe performance degradation. Coscheduling is a commonly used technique to solve this issue. With coscheduled virtual machines, all virtual CPUs are executed at the same time by the host. However, in a situation with virtual machines of arbitrary size, coscheduling of a whole virtual machine can lead to an under-utilization of the host. This situation occurs when the sizes of the virtual machines prohibit a scheduling where all cores of the host machines are used at every point in time.