Dynamic Virtual Machine Scheduling in Clouds for Architectural Shared Resources

Although virtual machine (VM) migration has been used to avoid conflicts on traditional system resources like CPU and memory, micro-architectural resources such as shared caches, memory controllers, and nonuniform memory access (NUMA) affinity, have only relied on intra-system scheduling to reduce contentions on them. This study shows that live VM migration can be used to mitigate the contentions on micro-architectural resources. Such cloud-level VM scheduling can widen the scope of VM selections for architectural shared resources beyond a single system, and thus improve the opportunity to further reduce possible conflicts. This paper proposes and evaluates two cluster-level virtual machine scheduling techniques for cache sharing and NUMA affinity, which do not require any prior knowledge on the behaviors of VMs.