Dependable virtual machine allocation

Abstract

The difficulty in allocating virtual machines (VMs) on servers stems from the requirement that sufficient resources (such as CPU capacity and network bandwidth) must be available for each VM in the event of a failure or maintenance work as well as for temporal fluctuations of resource demands, which often exhibit periodic patterns. We propose a mixed integer programming approach that considers the fluctuations of the resource demands for optimal and dependable allocation of VMs. At the heart of the approach are techniques for optimally partitioning the time-horizon into intervals of variable lengths and for reliably estimating the resource demands in each interval. We show that our new approach allocates VMs successfully in a cloud computing environment in a financial company, where the dependability requirement is strict and there are various types of VMs exist.