A quantitative analysis of performance of shared service systems with multiple resource contention

IT service providers employ server virtualization as a ba-sic building block of their platforms to increase the cost ef-fectiveness. The economic benefits from server virtualiza-tion come from higher resource utilization, reduced mainte-nance and operational costs including energy consumption. However, those benefits require efficient assignments of vir-tual servers or jobs to a limited number of physical hosts. The primary measures of evaluating efficiency of an assign-ment are that all the system resources are utilized effectively and the performance of each virtual machine is consistent with the desired performance bounds. While satisfying such SLA/performance bounds is essential for many classes of applications, the interference among the virtual machines makes such assurance admittedly difficult. This is primaril