Efficient resource provisioning in compute clouds via VM multiplexing

Resource provisioning in compute clouds often requires an estimate of the capacity needs of Virtual Machines (VMs). The estimated VM size is the basis for allocating resources commensurate with demand. In contrast to the traditional practice of estimating the size of VMs individually, we pro-pose a joint-VM provisioning approach in which multiple VMs are consolidated and provisioned together, based on an estimate of their aggregate capacity needs. This new ap-proach exploits statistical multiplexing among the workload patterns of multiple VMs, i.e., the peaks and valleys in one workload pattern do not necessarily coincide with the others. Thus, the unused resources of a low utilized VM can be bor-rowed by the other co-located VMs with high utilization. Compared to individual-VM based provisioning, joint-VM provisioning could lead to much higher resource utilization. This paper presents three design modules to enable such a concept in practice. Specifically, a performance constraint describing the capacity need of a VM for achieving a certain level of application performance; an algorithm for estimat-ing the aggregate size of multiplexed VMs; a VM selection algorithm that seeks to find those VM combinations with complementary workload patterns. We showcase that the proposed three modules can be seamlessly plugged into ap-plications such as resource provisioning, and providing re-source guarantees for VMs. The proposed method and ap-plications are evaluated by performance data collected from about 16 thousand VMs in commercial data centers. The results demonstrate more than 45 % improvements in terms of the overall resource utilization