On demand fine grain resource monitoring system for server consolidation

Server consolidation and virtualization technology are used in modern data center as a method to improve the server utilization rate by encouraging the sharing of physical resources between virtual machines (VM). Although, this can be realized by plenty of virtualization softwares available in markets, creating a good management policy for the server consolidation environment is still a challenging research problem. The policy should be able to maintain the high resource sharing rate, while keeping the performance drop rate as low as possible, which are totally contradict requirements. In order to progress the research in this area, a monitoring system, which can effectively monitor current system state and collect essential information, is indispensable. However, due to many differences in use case scenarios, monitoring systems designed for conventional management domain cannot be applied directly. This needs us to reconsider the design of the monitoring system. This paper proposes some key information that is still missing from existing monitoring systems as well as the design of Pantau, a monitoring system designed for capturing information necessary for server consolidation.