On network flow management in virtualized environments

Abstract

Virtualization has enabled the use of virtual machine (VM) based resource providers to offer computing power as a service. However, one important feature is to have certainty about the planed or expected performance of the applications that run inside the VMs. Therefore, consolidating the work load of web-based applications, with time-varying resource requirements, should be done in an automated way. We present and evaluate a network flow management component for the admission control of HTTP connections. We study this component, in our local resource manager (LRM), by using two types of common Web-based applications. The preliminary results shows that we can meet the number of successful served requests and at the same time avoid the degradation in the application's response times.