QoS-Aware VM Placement in Multi-domain Service Level Agreements Scenarios

Abstract

Virtualization technologies of Infrastructure-as-a- Service enable the live migration of running Virtual Machines (VMs) to achieve load balancing, fault-tolerance and hardware consolidation in data centers. However, the downtime/service unavailability due to live migration may be substantial with relevance to the customers' expectations on responsiveness, as the latter are declared in established Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Moreover, it may cause significant (potentially exponential) SLA violation penalties to its associated higher- level domains (Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service). Therefore, VM live migration should be managed carefully. In this paper, we present the OpenStack version of the Generic SLA Manager, alongside its strategies for VM selection and allocation during live migration of VMs. We simulate a use case where IaaS (OpenStack-SLAM) and PaaS (OpenShift) are combined, and assess performance and efficiency of the aforementioned VM placement strategies, when a multi-domain SLA pricing & penalty model is involved. We find that our proposal is efficient in managing trade-offs between the operational objectives of service providers (including financial considerations) and the customers' expected QoS requirements.