Addressing memory exhaustion failures in Virtual Machines in a cloud environment

Abstract

With the expansion of the cloud computing usage over a wide range of areas and different kinds of users, the cloud providers are taking full advantage of all their resources as much as they can. Memory is the most expensive resource in terms of oversubscribing and this has resulted in high price to the end user. Furthermore, performing swapping in Virtual Machines (VM) is expensive, so the cloud provider usually do not offer any swapping space for its systems. As a consequence, when a VM runs out of memory, user processes are killed. This scenario in the cloud environment is especially critical, since the user loses all of his/her execution time and, by extension, the money invested in this computation. This paper addresses this critical problem by providing a kernel extension that monitors the memory requirements of a VM and prevents the out of memory state by creating swapping space dynamically. The paper describes the design and implementation of a preliminary prototype of this kernel extensions and evaluates its performance.