Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

VMMB: Virtual Machine Memory Balancing for Unmodified Operating Systems

  • Published:
Journal of Grid Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Virtualization technology has been widely adopted in Internet hosting centers and cloud-based computing services, since it reduces the total cost of ownership by sharing hardware resources among virtual machines (VMs). In a virtualized system, a virtual machine monitor (VMM) is responsible for allocating physical resources such as CPU and memory to individual VMs. Whereas CPU and I/O devices can be shared among VMs in a time sharing manner, main memory is not amendable to such multiplexing. Moreover, it is often the primary bottleneck in achieving higher degrees of consolidation. In this paper, we present VMMB (Virtual Machine Memory Balancer), a novel mechanism to dynamically monitor the memory demand and periodically re-balance the memory among the VMs. VMMB accurately measures the memory demand with low overhead and effectively allocates memory based on the memory demand and the QoS requirement of each VM. It is applicable even to guest OS whose source code is not available, since VMMB does not require modifying guest kernel. We implemented our mechanism on Linux and experimented on synthetic and realistic workloads. Our experiments show that VMMB can improve performance of VMs that suffers from insufficient memory allocation by up to 3.6 times with low performance overhead (below 1%) for monitoring memory demand.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Simons, J., Buell, J.: Virtualizing high performance computing. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 44(4), 136–145 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Lange, J., Pedretti, K., Dinda, P., Bae, C., Bridges, P., Soltero, P., Merritt, A.: Minimal-overhead virtualization of a large scale supercomputer. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, pp. 169–180 (2011)

  3. Iosup, A., Ostermann, S., Yigitbasi, M.N., Prodan, R., Fahringer, T., Epema, D.H.J.: Performance analysis of cloud computing services for many-tasks scientific computing. IEEE T Parall Distr 22(6), 931–945 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Magenheimer, D.: Memory Overcommit Without the Commitment. Extended Abstract at the Xen Summit Boston 2008 (2008)

  5. Zhao, W., Wang, Z., Luo, Y.: Dynamic memory balancing for virtual machines. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 43(3), 37–47 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Gupta, D., Lee, S., Vrable, M., Savage, S., Snoeren, A.C., Varghese, G., Voelker, G.M., Vahdat, A.: Difference engine: harnessing memory redundancy in virtual machines. Commun. ACM 53(10), 85–93 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Barroso, L.A., Holzle, U.: The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines. Morgan and Claypool Publishers (2009)

  8. Waldspurger, C.A.: Memory resource management in VMware ESX server. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 36(SI), 181–194 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Scwidefsky, M., Franke, H., Mansell, R., Raj, H., Osisek, D., Choi, J.: Collaborative memory management in hosted linux environments. In: Proceedings of the Linux Symposium, vol. 2. Ottawa, Canada (2006)

  10. Jones, S.T., Arpaci-Dusseau, A.C., Arpaci-Dusseau, R.H.: Geiger: monitoring the buffer cache in a virtual machine environment. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 40(5), 14–24 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Lu, P., Shen, K.: Virtual machine memory access tracing with hypervisor exclusive cache. In: Proceeding of the 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 1–15. Berkeley, CA (2007)

  12. Clark, C., Fraser, K., Hand, S., Hansen, J.G., Jul, E., Limpach, C., Pratt, I., Warfield, A.: Live migration of virtual machines, In: Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation, pp. 273–286 (2005)

  13. Nelson, M., Lim, B.-H., Hutchins, G.: Fast transparent migration for virtual machines. In: Proceedings of USENIX Annual Technical Conference (2005)

  14. Hines, M.R., Gopalan, K.: Post-copy based live virtual machine migration using adaptive pre-paging and dynamic self-ballooning. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, pp. 51–60 (2009)

  15. Hermenier, F., Lorca, X., Menaud, J.-M., Muller, G., Lawall, J.: Entropy: a ConsolidationManager for Clusters. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, pp. 41–50 (2009)

  16. Wood, T., Shenoy, P., Venkataramani, A.: Black-box and gray-box strategies for virtual machine migration, In: Proceedings of the 4th Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation, pp. 229–242 (2007)

  17. Stage, A., Setzer, T.: Network-aware migration control and scheduling of differentiated virtual machine workloads. In: Proceedings of ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering Challenges of Cloud Computing, pp. 9–14 (2009)

  18. Andreolini, M., Casolari, S., Colajanni, M., Messori, M.: Dynamic Load Management of Virtual Machines in Cloud Architectures. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 34(6), 201–214 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Williams, D., Weatherspoon, H., Jamjoom, H., Liu, Y.: Overdriver: handling memory overload in an oversubscribed cloud. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, pp. 205–216 (2011)

  20. Mattson, R.L., Gecsei, J., Slutz, D., Traiger, I.L.: Evaluation techniques for storage hierarchies. IBM Syst. J. 9(2), 456–789 (1970)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Goldberg, R.P., Hassinger, R.: The double paging anomaly. In: Proceedings of the National Computer Conference and Exposition, pp. 195–199 (1974)

  22. Sherman, S.W., Brice, R.S.: Performance of a database manager in a virtual memory system. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 1(4), 317–343 (1976)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developers Manual vol. 3B: System Programming Guide, Part 2. Copyright 1997–2009 Intel Corporation.

  24. Cormen, T.H., Leiserson, C.E., Rivest, R.L., Stein, C.: Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd edn, pp. 308–329. The MIT Press (2009)

  25. Qureshi, M.K., Patt, Y.N.: Utility-based Cache Partitioning: A Low-overhead, High-performance, Runtime Mechanism to Partition Shared Caches. In: Proceedings of the 39th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, pp. 423–432 (2006)

  26. Bovet, D.P., Cesati, M.: Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd edn. O’Reilly (2005)

  27. Kivity, A., Kamay, Y., Laor, D., Lublin, U., Liguori, A.: kvm: the Linux virtual machine monitor. In: Proceedings of the 2007 Ottawa Linux Symposium, pp. 225–230 (2007)

  28. QEMU: http://wiki.qemu.org/ (2011). Accessed 15 August 2011

  29. SPEC CPU2000: http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/ (2011). Accessed 15 August 2011

  30. SPECjbb2005: http://www.spec.org/jbb2005/ (2011). Accessed 15 August 2011

  31. The Apache Software Foundation: http://www.apache.org/ (2011). Accessed 15 August 2011

  32. http_load: http://www.acme.com/software/http_load (2011). Accessed 15 August 2011

  33. Hwang, W., Roh, Y., Park, Y., KPark, W., Park, K.H.: HyperDealer: reference-pattern-aware instant memory balancing for consolidated virtual machines. In: Proceeding of the 2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing, pp. 426–434 (2010)

  34. Milos, G., Myrray, D.G., Hand, S., Fetterman, M.A.: Satori: enlightened page sharing. In: Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference (2009)

  35. Wong, T.M., Wilkes, J.: My cache or yours? Making storage more exclusive. In: Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 161–175. Monterey, CA (2002)

  36. Chen, Z., Zhou, Y., Li, K.: Eviction based placement for storage caches. In: Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 269–282. San Antonio, TX (2003)

  37. Milojicic, D.S., Douglis, F., Paindaveine, Y., Zhou, S.: Process Migration, ACM Comput. Surv. 32(3), 241–299 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Kozuch, M., Satyanarayanan, M.: Internet suspend/ resume. In: Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, pp. 40–46 (2002)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information & Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, 300 Cheoncheon-Dong, Jangan-Gu, Suwon, Gyeonggi-Do, 440-746, Korea

    Changwoo Min, Inhyeok Kim, Taehyoung Kim & Young Ik Eom

  2. Samsung Electronics, 416, Maetan-3Dong, Yeongtong-Gu, Suwon, Gyeonggi-Do, 443-742, Korea

    Changwoo Min

Authors
  1. Changwoo Min
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Inhyeok Kim
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Taehyoung Kim
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Young Ik Eom
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Young Ik Eom.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Min, C., Kim, I., Kim, T. et al. VMMB: Virtual Machine Memory Balancing for Unmodified Operating Systems. J Grid Computing 10, 69–84 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-012-9209-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-012-9209-4

Keywords

Search

Navigation