VirtX: Virtualization Technologies for Servers and Desktops

 

This project seeks to find innovative uses of virtualization technology to improve performance and reliability in desktops and server clusters. Our projects have demonstrated how virtual machine migration can be utilized for dynamic load balancing in enterprise data centers and for server consolidation. We are continuing to explore how virtualization can be utilized to improve performance and management of data centers running complex multi-tier and replicated services.

We are investigating topics that cover the spectrum from the initial deployment of applications in virtualized data centers to providing additional features like dynamic load balancing and fault tolerance at low cost by using virtualization:

  • Capacity Planning: Modeling the overheads incurred by the virtualization layer to help with application deployment
  • Server Placement: Consolidating servers by exploiting sharable memory between virtual machines
  • Performance: Automatically balancing load using virtual machine migration
  • Reliability: Using virtualization for cheaper fault tolerant data centers

Projects

  • ZZ exploits virtualization technologies to provide byzantine fault tolerance at low cost to data center applications.
  • Sandpiper uses virtual machine migration to provide dynamic provisioning in virtualized data centers.

Participants

 

Publications

 

The Case for Enterprise-ready Virtual Private Clouds

Timothy Wood, Alexandre Gerber, K.K. Ramakrishnan, and Jacobus van der Merwe. In proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, HotCloud 2009.
Paper

Memory Buddies: Exploiting Page Sharing for Smart Colocation in Virtualized Data Centers

Timothy Wood, Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin, Prashant Shenoy, Peter Desnoyers, Emmanuel Cecchet, Mark Corner. 2009 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE 2009), Washington, DC, USA, March 11-13, 2009.
Paper

Profiling and Modeling Resource Usage of Virtualized Applications

Timothy Wood, Ludmila Cherkasova, Kivanc Ozonat, and Prashant Shenoy. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM/Usenix conference on Middleware, Leuven Belgium, December 2008.
Paper

Black-box and Gray-box Strategies for Virtual Machine Migration

Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, Arun Venkataramani and Mazin Yousif. Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Cambridge, MA, April 2007.
Paper - Slides

 


Software Releases

 

Sandpiper

This release includes the software used for our NSDI 2007 paper. It includes a Xen specific resource monitoring component and a control plane which makes resource allocation and migration decisions. It is released under the GPL v2. Note: This code should be considered a research prototype, not a stable or complete release. It will likely require significant tweaking and configuration for your setup.