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An online integrated resource allocator for guaranteed performance in data centers
Divakaran D., Le T., Gurusamy M. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems25 (6):1382-1392,2014.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Sep 8 2015

Network resources can easily become the bottleneck in a data center (DC), potentially corrupting service-level objectives. Yet most previous work on resource allocation in virtualized DCs focuses only on server resources, ignoring communication aspects. This paper thus addresses a very important research problem: how to allocate requests for virtual machines to the available servers of the DC, taking into account both server resources and bandwidth.

The authors devise a heuristic algorithm for this problem, aiming to maximize the number of requests that can be accommodated by the DC, subject to server and network capacity constraints. This is a sophisticated proprietary heuristic, which considers several candidate partitions of the communication graph of the requested virtual machines. For each candidate partition, it is checked whether it can be mapped on a set of server clusters of the DC, taking into account the capacity constraints.

A particularly interesting aspect is that the authors also experimented with integrating an existing approximation algorithm for the related minimum k-cut problem. (In the minimum k-cut problem, the aim is to find a minimum cost set of edges in an undirected graph so that after the removal of these edges, the remaining graph decomposes into k components.)

A simulation-based evaluation and comparison against a load-balancing non-network-aware resource allocator complete the paper. In the investigated scenarios, the authors’ resource allocation algorithm consistently outperforms the load-balancing non-network-aware resource allocator.

Overall, this is a must-read for people working in the field of DC management, virtual machine placement, or DC networks.

Reviewer:  Zoltan Mann Review #: CR143746 (1511-0973)
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Distributed Databases (H.2.4 ... )
 
 
Servers (C.5.5 )
 
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