Utility analysis for Internet-oriented server consolidation in VM-based data centers

Server consolidation based on virtualization technology will simplify system administration, reduce the cost of power and physical infrastructure, and improve utilization in today's Internet-service-oriented enterprise data centers. How much power and how many servers for the underlying physical infrastructure are saved via server consolidation in VM-based data centers is of great interest to administrators and designers of those data centers. Various workload consolidations differ in saving power and physical servers for the infrastructure. The impacts caused by virtualization to those concurrent services are fluctuating considerably which may have a great effect on server consolidation. This paper proposes a utility analytic model for Internet-oriented server consolidation in VM-based data centers, modelling the interaction between server arrival requests with several QoS requirements, and capability flowing amongst concurrent services, based on the queuing theory. According to features of those services' workloads, this model can provide the upper bound of consolidated physical servers needed to guarantee QoS with the same loss probability of requests as in dedicated servers. At the same time, it can also evaluate the server consolidation in terms of power and utility of physical servers. Finally, we verify the model via a case study comprised of one e-book database service and one e-commerce Web service, simulated respectively by TPC-W and SPECweb2005 benchmarks. Our experiments show that the model is simple but accurate enough. The VM-based server consolidation saves up to 50% physical infrastructure, up to 53% power, and improves 1.7 times in CPU resource utilization, without any degradation of concurrent services' performance, running on Rainbow - our virtual computing platform.