Title: Shirako: Virtual Machine Hosting for Networked Clusters

Speaker: Laura Grit, Duke University

Date/Time: Monday, December 11, 2006, 10:00am – 11:00am

Location: CSRI Building/Room 90

Brief Abstract: Virtualization technology offers powerful resource management mechanisms, including performance-isolating resource schedulers, live migration, and suspend/resume. But how should networked virtual computing systems use these mechanisms? A grand challenge is to devise practical policies to drive these mechanisms in a self-managing or ``autonomic'' system, without relying on human operators. Management policy is a difficult challenge for at least three reasons.  First, resource management involves projections under uncertainty and optimization problems that are NP-hard in their general form, forcing us to adopt heuristics tailored for specific needs and settings. Second, these policy choices must balance the needs and interests of  multiple independent stakeholders. Finally, the resource assignments are dynamic:  they must adapt to changing workload and demands. At Duke, we are exploring this policy space using Shirako, a Java toolkit for resource leasing services. Although Shirako's leasing model can generalize to many kinds of shared resources (e.g., network resources), we are currently focused on using it as a basis for secure, adaptive, on-demand resource sharing in federated clusters. In this setting, the policies control VMs provisioning (sizing) and placement of VM images within the server network. In this talk I will describe the architectural and algorithmic issues for resource management policies in Shirako. I will also present extensions to Shirako for provisioning of fine-grained virtual machine ``slivers'' and the driving of virtual machine migration. Finally, I will illustrate the interactions of provisioning and placement/migration policies, and their impact.