Energy-efficiency enhanced virtual machine scheduling policy for mixed workloads in cloud environments

• Design two mechanisms (Share-Reclaiming and Collective I/O) and integrate them into the VM scheduler.
• Implement the Share-Reclaiming and Collective I/O mechanism on Xen platform.
• Introduce the normalized I/O energy-efficiency metric to evaluate energy losses caused by I/O virtualization.

Virtualization technology is an effective approach to improving the energy-efficiency in cloud platforms; however, it also introduces many energy-efficiency losses especially when I/O virtualization is involved. In this paper, we present an energy-efficiency enhanced virtual machine (VM) scheduling policy, namely Share-Reclaiming with Collective I/O (SRC-I/O), with aiming at reducing the energy-efficiency losses caused by I/O virtualization. The proposed SRC-I/O scheduler allows VMs to reclaim extra CPU shares in certain conditions so as to increase CPU utilization. Meanwhile, it separates I/O-intensive VMs from CPU-intensive ones and schedules them in a collective manner, so as to reduce the context-switching cost when scheduling mixed workloads. Extensive experiments are conducted on various platforms to investigate the performance of the proposed scheduler. The results indicate that when the system is in presence of mixed workloads, SRC-I/O scheduler outperforms many existing VM schedulers in terms of energy-efficiency and I/O responsiveness.

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