Guest-aware priority-based virtual machine scheduling for highly consolidated server

Abstract

The use of virtualization is rapidly expanding from server consolidation to various computing systems including PC, multimedia set-top box and gaming console. However, different from the server environment, timeliness response for the external input is an essential property for the user-interactive applications. To provide timeliness scheduling of virtual machine this paper presents a priority-based scheduling scheme for virtual machine monitors. The suggested scheduling scheme selects the next task to be scheduled based on the task priorities and the I/O usage stats of the virtual machines. The suggested algorithm was implemented and evaluated on Xen virtual machine monitor. The results showed that the average response time to I/O events is improved by 5~22% for highly consolidated environment. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.