HeteroVisor: Exploiting Resource Heterogeneity to Enhance the Elasticity of Cloud Platforms

This paper presents HeteroVisor, a heterogeneity-aware hypervisor, that exploits resource heterogeneity to enhance the elasticity of cloud systems. Introducing the notion of 'elasticity' (E) states, HeteroVisor permits applications to manage their changes in resource requirements as state transitions that implicitly move their execution among heterogeneous platform components. Masking the details of platform heterogeneity from virtual machines, the E-state abstraction allows applications to adapt their resource usage in a fine-grained manner via VM-specific 'elasticity drivers' encoding VM-desired policies. The approach is explored for the heterogeneous processor and memory subsystems evolving for modern server platforms, leading to mechanisms that can manage these heterogeneous resources dynamically and as required by the different VMs being run. HeteroVisor is implemented for the Xen hypervisor, with mechanisms that go beyond core scaling to also deal with memory resources, via the online detection of hot memory pages and transparent page migration. Evaluation on an emulated heterogeneous platform uses workload traces from real-world data, demonstrating the ability to provide high on-demand performance while also reducing resource usage for these workloads.