Multi-Dimensional Regression Host Utilization algorithm (MDRHU) for Host Overload Detection in Cloud Computing

Abstract

The use of cloud computing data centers is growing rapidly to meet the tremendous increase in demand for high-performance computing (HPC), storage and networking resources for business and scientific applications. Virtual machine (VM) consolidation involves the live migration of VMs to run on fewer physical servers, and thus allowing more servers to be switched off or run on low-power mode, as to improve the energy consumption efficiency, operating cost and CO2 emission. A crucial step in VM consolidation is host overload detection, which attempts to predict whether or not a physical server will be oversubscribed with VMs. In contrast to the majority of previous work which use CPU utilization as the sole indicator for host overload, a recent study has proposed a multiple regression host overload detection algorithm, which takes multiple factors into consideration: CPU, memory and network BW utilization. This paper provides further improvement along two directions. First, we provide Multi-Dimensional Regression Host Utilization (MDRHU) algorithms that combine CPU, memory and network BW utilization via Euclidean Distance (MDRHU-ED) and absolute summation (MDRHU-AS), respectively. This leads to improved results in terms of energy consumption and service level agreement violation. Second, the study explicitly takes real-world HPC workloads into consideration. Our extensive simulation study further illustrates the superiority of our proposed algorithms over existing methods. In particular, as compared to the most recently proposed multiple regression algorithm that is based on Geometric Relation (GR), our proposed algorithms provide an improvement of at least 12% in energy consumption, and an improvement of at least 80% in a metric that combines energy consumption, service-level-violation, and number of VM migrations.