Advantages, Challenges and Optimizations of Virtual Machine Scheduling in Cloud Computing Environments

Abstract

—Cloud computing enjoys the many attractive attributes of virtualization technology, such as consolidation, isolation, migration and suspend/resume support. In this model of computing, some desirable features such as scalability are provided by means of a new type of building blocks called virtual machines (VMs). As with any other construction block, VMs have their own scheduling challenges and advantages. This paper presents the major differences between scheduling VMs and other schedulable blocks such as processes and explains why traditional scheduling techniques used in operating systems to schedule processes or threads are not suited to VMs. New techniques to help co-scheduling virtual resources in a concurrent environment are proposed and simulated on an extension of CloudSim simulator. Simulation results of virtual processor co-scheduling show comparatively higher system performance than the methods that do not use co-scheduling