Title: An energy-efficient virtual machine scheduler based on CPU share-reclaiming policy

Authors: Qu Xilong; Xiao Peng

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Hunan Institute of Engineering, Xiangtan City 411104, China ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, Hunan Institute of Engineering, Xiangtan City 411104, China

Abstract: With the development of cloud computing, resource virtualisation technology has been widely applied for deploying large-scale IT-infrastructures in many high-performance data centres. However, using virtualisation technology will also lead to some extra performance costs, especially when the cloud system is in the presence of mixed-workloads. In this paper, we present a novel virtual machine scheduling approach, namely share-reclaiming policy, in which the scheduler allows virtual machines to obtain extra CPU shares if they were frequently blocked by I/O interrupted recently. By this policy, short-term I/O-intensive tasks will have more chances of being scheduled so as to compensate their performance losses caused by I/O operations. Extensive experiments are conducted by using various benchmarks; the results show that the proposed policy outperforms existing scheduling algorithm in the terms of energy-efficiency, especially when the virtualised system is in the presence of intensive mixed-workloads.

Keywords: cloud computing; energy efficiency; resource virtualisation; context switch; task scheduling; virtual machine scheduling; CPU share reclaiming policy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGUC.2015.068826

International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, 2015 Vol.6 No.2, pp.113 - 120

Received: 04 Jan 2014
Accepted: 24 Apr 2014
Published online: 14 Apr 2015 *

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