Fast Virtual Machine Resume for Agile Cloud Services

Research output: Contribution to conferencesPaperContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Resuming virtual machines is an important management operation in the virtualized data center. (Re)-instantiating VMs as quickly as possible helps to combat flash crowds and provide true on-demand services. Unfortunately, resuming a VM currently takes tens of seconds, depending on the VM's size and available disk I/O bandwidth. Because it is not strictly necessary to read the entire state from disk to continue executing the VM instance, we propose an on-demand resume feature. Instead of indiscriminately reading the entire state from disk, we utilize the host OS's support for lazily reading pages from disk only when they are needed. We have implemented our idea as part of the open-source, virtual machine emulator qemu. Our idea required to modify less than 100 lines of code. The experimental evaluation of our on-demand resume feature reveals that it works as expected: resume times no longer depend on the VM's total state but rather on the actively used state. We are able to resume instances with multiple gigabytes of state in as little as 3 seconds, i.e., we reduced the resume time to less than 1/10th compared to the default implementation.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages127-134
Number of pages8
Publication statusPublished - 2013
Peer-reviewedYes

Conference

Title2013 International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing
Abbreviated titleCGC 2013
Conference number3
Duration30 September - 2 October 2013
Website
Degree of recognitionInternational event
CityKarlsruhe
CountryGermany

External IDs

Scopus 84893337691

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

DFG Classification of Subject Areas according to Review Boards

Keywords

  • virtualization, virtual machining, random access memory, processor scheduling, Optimization, Image coding, Writing, Operating systems, checkpointing, could service, checkpointing, Cloud services