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Efficient resource management for virtual desktop cloud computing

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Abstract

In virtual desktop cloud computing, user applications are executed in virtual desktops on remote servers. This offers great advantages in terms of usability and resource utilization; however, handling a large amount of clients in the most efficient manner poses important challenges. Especially deciding how many clients to handle on one server, and where to execute the user applications at each time is important. Assigning too many users to one server leads to customer dissatisfaction, while assigning too little leads to higher investments costs. We study different aspects to optimize the resource usage and customer satisfaction. The results of the paper indicate that the resource utilization can increase with 29% by applying the proposed optimizations. Up to 36.6% energy can be saved when the size of the online server pool is adapted to the system load by putting redundant hosts into sleep mode.

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Acknowledgements

Lien Deboosere and Bert Vankeirsbilck are funded by a Ph.D. grant from the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation through Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT-Vlaanderen). Part of the research leading to these results was done for the MobiThin Project and has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No. 216946.

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  1. Ghent University - IBBT, Gaston Crommenlaan 8, bus 201, 9050, Ghent, Belgium

    Lien Deboosere, Bert Vankeirsbilck, Pieter Simoens, Filip De Turck, Bart Dhoedt & Piet Demeester

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  1. Lien Deboosere
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  2. Bert Vankeirsbilck
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  3. Pieter Simoens
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  4. Filip De Turck
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  5. Bart Dhoedt
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Correspondence to Lien Deboosere.

Appendix: Impact of overbooking on user satisfaction: analytical use case

Appendix: Impact of overbooking on user satisfaction: analytical use case

For the customer, it is important that the negative impact of overbooking on the amount of SLA violations experienced is acceptable. Applying a certain overbooking degree and the advanced resource scheduler essentially means that a virtual desktop never encounters an SLA violation when the requested resources do not exceed the reserved resources. When the virtual desktop requests more resources than reserved, it can encounter an SLA violation depending on the resource requests of other virtual desktops executed on the same host. Only when the total amount of requested resources exceeds the available resources (F) of the host, at least one virtual desktop experiences an SLA violation. The probability that this occurs is calculated as

Deducing the amount of virtual desktops experiencing an SLA violation—when the advanced resource scheduler is applied—is complicated. To make an analytical deduction of the probability that a virtual desktop encounters an SLA violation treatable, the following assumptions are made. We assume that the distributions of the resource consumption of the virtual desktops are identical and independent normal distributions: N(μ,σ 2). The deduction below treats a fully reserved host with three VDs and an overbooking degree of 50% (i.e., μ resources are reserved for each VD).

It is obvious that when all three virtual desktops request less resources than reserved, no SLA violations occur on the host. The domain in which all three virtual desktops request less resources than reserved is called D 0={∀req 1,req 2,req 3:req 1,req 2,req 3≤μ}. On the other hand, when all three virtual desktops request more resources than reserved, all three virtual desktops experience an SLA violation. This domain is called D 3={∀req 1,req 2,req 3:req 1,req 2,req 3>μ}. When some virtual desktops request more resources than reserved and others request less resources than reserved, elaborations are required to determine the probability that a virtual desktop encounters an SLA violation. In this deduction, two cases can be distinguished: (i) the combination of one VD requesting less resources than reserved and two VDs requesting more resources than reserved (domain D 1={∀req 1,req 2,req 3:req 1≤μ&req 2,req 3>μ}), and (ii) the combination of two VDs requesting less resources than reserved and one VD requesting more resources than reserved (domain D 2={∀req 1,req 2,req 3:req 1,req 2≤μ&req 3>μ}).

In the first case, i.e. in domain D 1, either 0, 1 or 2 virtual desktops experience an SLA violation. The probability that no SLA violations occur is calculated as the probability that the amount of additional resources requested by req 2 and req 3 are smaller than the amount of resources put in the resource pool by req 1. The probability that two SLA violations occur is calculated as the probability that both req 2 and req 3 request more than half of the resources put in the resource pool by req 1. Finally, the probability that exactly one virtual desktop encounters an SLA violation can be deduced from the previous probabilities.

In the second case, i.e. in domain D 2, either 0 or 1 virtual desktop experiences an SLA violation. Similarly to the first case, the probability that no SLA violations occur is calculated as the probability that the amount of additional resources requested by req 3 is smaller than the amount of resources put in the resource pool by req 1 and req 2. The probability that one SLA violation occurs is easily deduced from the previous probability.

Discussing the calculation of all above probabilities in detail might be superfluous. Basic statistical methods can be applied to calculate the probabilities. As an example, the main steps of the first case (i.e., domain D 1) are presented below.

The probability that no SLA violations occur is calculated as

(3)

with \(f_{\mathit{req}_{1}}(x_{1})\) the density function of the distribution of req 1 in domain D 1.

To calculate the expected value of the sum of req 2 and req 3, the density function of the sum of those resource requests has to be composed first. In the case of identically and independently distributions, the density function for y=req 2+req 3 is

Substituting the expected value E[y]=E[req 2+req 3] of the density function f y (y) into (3) allows to calculate the probability that no SLA violations occur in domain D 1.

Next, the probability that two SLA violations occur is elaborated—under the assumption that the distributions of the resource requests are identical and independent—as

(4)
(5)

The average number of SLA violations in domain D 1 is then calculated as

In general, the average number of SLA violations on a host with n i virtual desktops is calculated as

The general approach of the analytical deduction presented above is applicable when the number of VDs on a host increases, however it becomes hard to analytically deduce the density distribution of the sum of a large amount of resource requests.

Therefore, simulations are used to determine the average amount of SLA violations on a host when more VDs are executed on the host. The results of the simulations can be found in Fig. 12. In each simulation, the resource requests of a VD are distributed according to a normal distribution N(10000,1500) and the total amount of FLOPS of the host is equal to the total amount of reserved resources. Each simulation has been conducted until there was no significantly difference between the running average of two consecutive iterations.

Fig. 12
figure 12

Probability that a virtual desktop experiences an SLA violation for different amounts of simultaneous virtual desktops on a host with an overbooking degree of 50%. In each case, the total amount of available FLOPS of the host is completely reserved by the virtual desktops. The results are compared for the simple scheduler (i.e. standard scheduler in CloudSim) and the advanced scheduler discussed in Sect. 3.2

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The results of Fig. 12 show that applying an overbooking degree of 50% does not necessarily lead to a probability on SLA violations of 50% when the advanced resource scheduler is used.

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Deboosere, L., Vankeirsbilck, B., Simoens, P. et al. Efficient resource management for virtual desktop cloud computing. J Supercomput 62, 741–767 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-012-0747-0

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