Automatic Performance Tuning for the Virtualized Cluster System

System virtualization can aggregate the functionality of multiple standalone computer systems into a single hardware computer. It is significant to virtualize the computing nodes with multi-core processors in the cluster system, in order to promote the usage of the hardware while decrease the cost of the power. In the virtualized cluster system, multiple virtual machines are running on a computing node. However, it is a challenging issue to automatically balance the workload in virtual machines on each physical computing node, which is different from the traditional cluster system's load balance. In this paper, we propose a management framework for the virtualized cluster system, and present an automatic performance tuning strategy to balance the workload in the virtualized cluster system. We implement a working prototype of the management framework (VEMan) based on Xen, and test the performance of the tuning strategy on a virtualized heterogeneous cluster system. The experimental result indicates that the management framework and tuning strategy are feasible to improve the performance of the virtualized cluster system.