T.F. Vachon and J.D. Teresco (USA)
parallel computing systems, virtual operating systems, dy namic load balancing
Operating system virtualization has recently become a pop ular technique to achieve better resource utilization in so called “server farm” environments. This technique pro vides a virtual hardware interface on top of which one can run multiple instances of popular operating systems. The Xen Virtual Machine Monitor is an implementation of op erating system virtualization that supports live migration, the transfer of a virtual operating system from one physi cal machine to another with minimal down time. We have utilized this capability to implement a monitoring and dy namic reconfiguration daemon that attempts to equalize the load on all host nodes in a group of machines running Xen. We have also implemented a simulator for testing balancing algorithms. Experiments using these tools have provided insight into the redistribution of virtualized operating sys tems and how this differs from the more thoroughly-studied problem of process-level load balancing.
Important Links:
Go Back
