Adaptive Resource Provisioning for Virtualized Servers Using Kalman Filters

Resource management of virtualized servers in data centers has become a critical task, since it enables cost-effective consolidation of server applications. Resource management is an important and challenging task, especially for multitier applications with unpredictable time-varying workloads. Work in resource management using control theory has shown clear benefits of dynamically adjusting resource allocations to match fluctuating workloads. However, little work has been done toward adaptive controllers for unknown workload types. This work presents a new resource management scheme that incorporates the Kalman filter into feedback controllers to dynamically allocate CPU resources to virtual machines hosting server applications. We present a set of controllers that continuously detect and self-adapt to unforeseen workload changes. Furthermore, our most advanced controller also self-configures itself without any a priori information and with a small 4.8% performance penalty in the case of high-intensity workload changes. In addition, our controllers are enhanced to deal with multitier server applications: by using the pair-wise resource coupling between tiers, they improve server response to large workload increases as compared to controllers with no such resource-coupling mechanism. Our approaches are evaluated and their performance is illustrated on a 3-tier Rubis benchmark website deployed on a prototype Xen-virtualized cluster.