Towards VM Consolidation Using a Hierarchy of Idle States
Rayman Preet Singh, Tim B. Brecht, Srinivasan Keshav · 2015
Typical VM consolidation approaches re-pack VMs into fewer physical machines, resulting in energy and cost savings [13, 19, 23, 40]. Recent work has explored a just-in time approach to VM consolidation by transitioning VMsto an inactive state when idle and activating them on the arrival of client requests[17, 21]. This leads to increased VM density at the cost of an increase in client request latency (called miss penalty). The VM density so obtained, although greater, is still limited by the number of VMs that can be hosted in the one inactive state. If idle VMs were hosted in multiple inactive states, VM density can be increased further while ensuring small miss penalties. However, VMs in different inactive states have different capacities, activation times, and resource requirements.