A Dynamic Memory Allocation Approach Based on Balloon Technology on Virtualization Platform

Abstract

In virtualization platforms, Virtual Machines(VMs) have different memory demand when running different applications. Applications with high memory demand often result in guest swapping and performance degradation of the VM. Because of the semantic gap between the Virtual Machine Monitor(VMM) and the guest Operating System(OS), it is impossible to achieve reasonable allocation and use of memory resources between the guests. Our goal is to monitor the memory information in real time and achieve memory recovery and replenish of each VM in case of memory fluctuation. This method builds up a reasonable swapping mechanism, which can achieve automatic balance of memory allocation among multiple VMs, optimize guest swapping and improve memory utilization. We display it by visualization module. Based on ballooning technology, this paper designs a dynamic memory allocation method in KVM virtualization platform, which consists of memory monitoring, memory dynamic allocation, memory resource visualization and other modules. The results of many tests and analysis demonstrate that our method has the ability to basically achieve our expected goals and requirements.