Automatic Power-Aware Reconfiguration of Processor Resource in Virtualized Clusters

Virtualization provides significant benefits of system maintenance, load balancing, fault tolerance, and power-saving in clusters or data centers. It also enables dynamic reconfiguration of computing resource for application environment. However, current dynamic resource control approaches mainly focus on how to satisfy the application-level quality of service (QoS) when application workloads vary with time. They are driven by application performance, which is often specific to certain class of applications and also weakens the response capability of control systems. In this paper, a resource-use-status-driven resource reconfiguration scheme (RUSiC) is presented to automatically adapt to dynamic workload changes to meet the demands of application performance. According to the new characteristics introduced by system virtualization, the scheme is designed to be a two-layer resource reconfiguration model to exactly grasp the demands of applications. Based on real resource use status, the scheme adjusts proper resource configuration for applications in time. Furthermore, the scheme introduces power-saving into resource reconfiguration process and avoids considerable unnecessary power and cooling consumption by reducing the number of active physical nodes in a new resource configuration. Experiments demonstrate that the scheme can quickly detect and respond to shifting resource demands as application workloads change over time.