Cooperative dynamic scheduling of virtual machines in distributed systems

Abstract

Cloud Computing aims at outsourcing data and applications hosting and at charging clients on a per-usage basis. These data and applications may be packaged in virtual machines (VM), which are themselves hosted by nodes, i.e. physical machines. Consequently, several frameworks have been designed to manage VMs on pools of nodes. Unfortunately, most of them do not efficiently address a common objective of cloud providers: maximizing system utilization while ensuring the quality of service (QoS). The main reason is that these frameworks schedule VMs in a static way and/or have a centralized design. In this article, we introduce a framework that enables to schedule VMs cooperatively and dynamically in distributed systems. We evaluated our prototype through simulations, to compare our approach with the centralized one. Preliminary results showed that our scheduler was more reactive. As future work, we plan to investigate further the scalability of our framework, and to improve reactivity and fault-tolerance aspects. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.