Cooperative Resource Management in a IaaS

Virtualized IaaS generally rely on a server consolidation system to pack virtual machines (VMs) on as few servers as possible, for energy saving. However, two situations are not taken into account, and could enhance consolidation. First, since the managed VMs can be of various sizes (small, medium, large, etc.), VMs packing can be obstructed when sizes don\´t fit available spaces on servers. Therefore, we would need to "split" such VMs. Second, two VMs which host replicas of the same application server (for scalability) could be "fusion Ned" when they are located on the same physical server, in order to reduce virtualization overhead and VMs memory footprint. Split and fusion operations lead to the management of elastic VMs and requires cooperation between the application level and the provider level, as they impact management at both levels. In this paper, we propose a IaaS resource management system which implements elastic VMs based on split/fusion operations and cooperative management. We show its benefit with a set of experiments.