Dynamic memory balancing for virtual machines

ABSTRACT

Virtualization essentially enables multiple operating systems and applications to run on one physical computer by multiplexing hardware resources. A key motivation for applying virtualization is to improve hardware resource utilization while maintaining reasonable quality of service. However, such a goal cannot be achieved without efficient resource management. Though most physical resources, such as processor cores and I/O devices, are shared among virtual machines using time slicing and can be scheduled flexibly based on priority, allocating an appropriate amount of main memory to virtual machines is more challenging. Different applications have different memory requirements. Even a single application shows varied working set sizes during its execution. An optimal memory management strategy under a virtualized environment thus needs to dynamically adjust memory allocation for each virtual machine, which further requires a prediction model that forecasts its host physical memory needs on the fly. This paper introduces MEmory Balancer (MEB) which dynamically monitors the memory usage of each virtual machine, accurately predicts its memory needs, and periodically reallocates host memory. MEB uses two effective memory predictors which, respectively, estimate the amount of memory available for reclaiming without a notable performance drop, and additional memory required for reducing the virtual machine paging penalty. Our experimental results show that our prediction schemes yield high accuracy and low overhead. Furthermore, the overall system throughput can be significantly improved with MEB.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jikes RVM. URL http://www.jikesrvm.org/.
• 2: SPEC CPU2000, a. URL http://www.spec.org/cpu2000.
• 3: SPECweb2005, b. URL http://www.spec.org/web2005.
• 4: B. Alpern , C. R. Attanasio , J. J. Barton , M. G. Burke , P. Cheng , J.-D. Choi , A. Cocchi , S. J. Fink , D. Grove , M. Hind , S. F. Hummel , D. Lieber , V. Litvinov , M. F. Mergen , T. Ngo , J. R. Russell , V. Sarkar , M. J. Serrano , J. C. Shepherd , S. E. Smith , V. C. Sreedhar , H. Srinivasan , J. Whaley, The Jalapeño virtual machine, IBM Systems Journal, v.39 n.1, p.211-238, January 2000
• 5: Bowen Alpern , C. R. Attanasio , Anthony Cocchi , Derek Lieber , Stephen Smith , Ton Ngo , John J. Barton , Susan Flynn Hummel , Janice C. Sheperd , Mark Mergen, Implementing jalapeño in Java, Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.314-324, November 01-05, 1999, Denver, Colorado, United States
• 6: V. Application. Intel 64 and IA-32 architecture software developer's manual,2006. URL citeseer.ist.psu.edu/484264.html.
• 7: Matthew Arnold , Stephen Fink , David Grove , Michael Hind , Peter F. Sweeney, Adaptive optimization in the Jalapeño JVM, Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.47-65, October 2000, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
• 8: Paul Barham , Boris Dragovic , Keir Fraser , Steven Hand , Tim Harris , Alex Ho , Rolf Neugebauer , Ian Pratt , Andrew Warfield, Xen and the art of virtualization, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, v.37 n.5, December 2003
• 9: Stephen M. Blackburn , Robin Garner , Chris Hoffmann , Asjad M. Khang , Kathryn S. McKinley , Rotem Bentzur , Amer Diwan , Daniel Feinberg , Daniel Frampton , Samuel Z. Guyer , Martin Hirzel , Antony Hosking , Maria Jump , Han Lee , J. Eliot B. Moss , B. Moss , Aashish Phansalkar , Darko Stefanović , Thomas VanDrunen , Daniel von Dincklage , Ben Wiedermann, The DaCapo benchmarks: java benchmarking development and analysis, Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, October 22-26, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA
• 10: Dhruba Chandra , Fei Guo , Seongbeom Kim , Yan Solihin, Predicting Inter-Thread Cache Contention on a Chip Multi-Processor Architecture, Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, p.340-351, February 12-16, 2005 [doi>10.1109/HPCA.2005.27]
• 11: Stephen T. Jones , Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau , Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, Geiger: monitoring the buffer cache in a virtual machine environment, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, v.40 n.5, December 2006
• 12: Pin Lu , Kai Shen, Virtual machine memory access tracing with hypervisor exclusive cache, 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference on Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, p.1-15, June 17-22, 2007, Santa Clara, CA
• 13: Dan Magenheimer. Memory overcommit. . . without the commitment, 2008.
• 14: R. L. Mattson, J. Gecsei, D. Slutz, and I. L. Traiger. Evaluation techniques for storage hierarchies. IBM System Journal, 9(2):78--117, 1970.
• 15: Rabin A. Sugumar , Santosh G. Abraham, Efficient simulation of caches under optimal replacement with applications to miss characterization, Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGMETRICS conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, p.24-35, May 10-14, 1993, Santa Clara, California, United States
• 16: Carl A. Waldspurger, Memory resource management in VMware ESX server, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, v.36 n.SI, Winter 2002 [doi>10.1145/844128.844146]
• 17: Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, and Arun. Black-box and gray-box strategies for virtual machine migration. pages 229--242. URL http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi07/tech/wood.html.
• 18: Ting Yang , Matthew Hertz , Emery D. Berger , Scott F. Kaplan , J. Eliot B. Moss, Automatic heap sizing: taking real memory into account, Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Memory management, October 24-25, 2004, Vancouver, BC, Canada [doi>10.1145/1029873.1029881]
• 19: Ting Yang , Emery D. Berger , Scott F. Kaplan , J. Eliot B. Moss, CRAMM: virtual memory support for garbage-collected applications, Proceedings of the 7th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation, November 06-08, 2006, Seattle, Washington
• 20: Pin Zhou , Vivek Pandey , Jagadeesan Sundaresan , Anand Raghuraman , Yuanyuan Zhou , Sanjeev Kumar, Dynamic tracking of page miss ratio curve for memory management, Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, October 07-13, 2004, Boston, MA, USA

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.8 Performance

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.2 Storage Management

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Management, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
lru histogram, memory balancing, virtual machine