Research on resource allocation for multi-tier web applications in a virtualization environment

Abstract

Resource allocation for multi-tier web applications in virtualization environments is one of the most important problems in autonomous computing. On one hand, the more resources that are provisioned to a multitier web application, the easier it is to meet service level objectives (SLO). On the other hand, the virtual machine which hosts the multi-tier web application needs to be consolidated as much as possible in order to maintain high resource utilization. This paper presents an adaptive resource controller which consists of a feedback utilization controller and an auto-regressive and moving average model (ARMA)-based model estimator. It can meet application-level quality of service (QoS) goals while achieving high resource utilization. To evaluate the proposed controllers, simulations are performed on a testbed simulating a virtual data center using Xen virtual machines. Experimental results indicate that the controllers can improve CPU utilization and make the best tradeoff between resource utilization and performance for multi-tier web applications.