Adaptive dynamic priority scheduling for virtual desktop infrastructures

popularity in cloud computing by allowing companies to deploy their office environments in a virtualized setting instead of relying on physical desktop machines. Consolidating many users into a VDI environment can significantly lower IT management expenses and enables new features such as “available-anywhere” desktops. However, barriers to broad adoption include the slow performance of virtualized I/O, CPU scheduling interference problems, and shared-cache contention. In this paper, we propose a new soft real-time scheduling algorithm that employs flexi-ble priority designations (via utility functions) and automated scheduler class detection (via hypervisor monitoring of user behavior) to provide a higher quality user experience. We have implemented our scheduler within the Xen virtualization platform, and demonstrate that the overheads incurred from co-locating large numbers of virtual machines can be reduced from 66 % with existing schedulers to under 2 % in our system. We evaluate the benefits and overheads of using a smaller scheduling time quantum in a VDI setting, and show that the average overhead time per scheduler call is on the same order as the existing SEDF and Credit schedulers. Index Terms—Xen, scheduler, virtual desktop infrastructure, desktop virtualization, cloud computing I