Study on performance management and application behavior in virtualized environment

Control theory has been utilized in recent years to manage the resources in virtualized environment for applications with time-varying resource demand. The systems under control, including the servers and the applications, are taken as black-boxes, and the controllers are generally expected to be adaptive to the underline systems. However, little attention has been paid to the behaviors of the applications themselves, and most of time, single performance target such as the mean response time threshold has been tracked. In this paper, we experimentally show that more than one performance metrics have to be considered to characterize the quality of service that the end users receive when the performance is managed through dynamic resource allocation. Moreover, the behavior of the applications, especially that of the workload generators has significant effect on the quality of the service. Our study provides insights and guidance for end-to-end performance management problem in virtualized environment.