A Decentralized Approach for Homogenizing Load Distribution

Abstract

Running a sheer virtualized data center with the help of Virtual Machines (VM) is the de facto-standard in modern data centers. Live migration offers immense flexibility opportunities as it endows the system administrators with tools to seamlessly move VMs across physical machines. Several studies have shown that the resource utilization within a data center is not homogeneous across the physical servers. Load imbalance situations are observed where a significant portion of servers are either in overloaded or underloaded states. Apart from leading to inefficient usage of energy by underloaded servers, this might lead to serious QoS degradation issues in the overloaded servers.In this paper, we propose a lightweight decentralized solution for homogenizing the load across different machines in a data center. In search of better solutions, we have looked outside the field of computer science for inspiration. Inspired by Nobel Peace Prize winners Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley's work on Stable Matching [4], we borrow the concept of stable marriage matching problems where we pair pairs of underloaded servers and overloaded servers based on some notion of preferences for the purpose of homogenizing their load through exchange of VMs. Furthermore, our solution is distributed by accommodating this aspect in the original Stable Matching algorithm. We provide some real-life experimental results that demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. CCS CONCEPTS• Hardware → Power estimation and optimization; Enterprise level and data centers power issues; • Software and its engineering → Virtual machines;