SCROOGEVM: Boosting Cloud Resource Utilization With Dynamic Oversubscription

Despite continuous improvements, cloud physical resources remain underused, hence severely impacting the efficiency of these infrastructures at large. To overcome this inefficiency, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers usually compensate for oversized Virtual Machines (VMs) by offering more virtual resources than are physically available on a host. However, this technique—known as oversubscription—may hinder performances when a statically-defined oversubscription ratio results in resource contention of hosted VMs. Therefore, instead of setting a static and cluster-wide ratio, this article studies how a greedy increase of the oversubscription ratio per Physical Machine (PM) and resources type can preserve performance goals. Keeping performance unchanged allows our contribution to be more realistically adopted by production-scale IaaS infrastructures. This contribution, named ScroogeVM, leverages the detection of PM stability to carefully increase the associated oversubscription ratios. Based on metrics shared by public cloud providers, we investigate the impact of resource oversubscription on performance degradation. Subsequently, we conduct a comparative analysis of ScroogeVM with state-of-the-art oversubscription computations. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods by leveraging the presence of long-lasting VMs, while avoiding live migration penalties and performance impacts for stakeholders.