A distributed approach to dynamic VM management

Computing today is increasingly moving into large-scale virtualized data centres, offering computing resources in the form of virtual machines (VMs) on a pay-per-usage basis. In order to minimize costs, VMs should be consolidated on as few physical machines (PMs) as possible, switching idle PMs into a power saving mode. It may be necessary to dynamically allocate and reallocate VMs to PMs in order to meet highly dynamic VM resource requirements. The problem of assigning VMs to PMs is known to be NP-Hard. Most solutions focus on a centralized approach, with a single management node making allocation decisions periodically. This approach suffers from poor scalability and the existence of a single point of failure. We present a fully distributed approach to dynamic VM management, and evaluate our approach using a simulation tool. Results indicate that the distributed approach can achieve similar performance to the centralized solution, while eliminating the single point of failure and reducing the network bandwidth required for management.