Using Network Knowledge to Improve Workload Performance in Virtualized Data Centers

Abstract

The scale and expense of modern data centers motivates running them as efficiently as possible. This paper explores how virtualized data center performance can be improved when network traffic and topology data informs VM placement. Our practical heuristics, tested on network-heavy, scale-out workloads in an 80 server cluster, improve overall performance by up to 70% compared to random placement in a multi-tenant configuration.