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Dynamic Memory Pressure Aware Ballooning

Published: 05 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Hardware virtualization is a major component of large scale server and data center deployments due to their facilitation of server consolidation and scalability. Virtualization, however, comes at a high cost in terms of system main memory utilization. Current virtual machine (VM) memory management solutions impose a high performance penalty and are oblivious to the operating regime of the system. Therefore, there is a great need for low-impact VM memory management techniques which are aware of and reactive to current system state, to drive down the overheads of virtualization.
We observe that the host machine operates under different memory pressure regimes, as the memory demand from guest VMs changes dynamically at runtime. Adapting to this runtime system state is critical to reduce the performance cost of VM memory management. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic memory management policy called Memory Pressure Aware (MPA) ballooning. MPA ballooning dynamically allocates memory resources to each VM based on the current memory pressure regime. Moreover, MPA ballooning proactively reacts and adapts to sudden changes in memory demand from guest VMs. MPA ballooning requires neither additional hardware support, nor incurs extra minor page faults in its memory pressure estimation. We show that MPA ballooning provides an 13.2% geomean speed-up versus the current ballooning techniques across a set of application mixes running in guest VMs; often yielding performance nearly identical to that of a non-memory constrained system.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Towards Swap-Free, Continuous Ballooning for Fast, Cloud-Based Virtual Machine MigrationsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698543(269-283)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Meunik: Rethinking Virtual Machine Memory Resource Management for Unikernel-Based VMs2024 IEEE/ACM Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC)10.1109/SEC62691.2024.00030(292-305)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
  • (2022)Live migration of virtual machine memory content in networked systemsComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2022.108898209(108898)Online publication date: May-2022
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cover image ACM Other conferences
MEMSYS '15: Proceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Memory Systems
October 2015
278 pages
ISBN:9781450336048
DOI:10.1145/2818950
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 October 2015

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Author Tags

  1. Memory Management
  2. Operating System
  3. Virtualization

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  • Refereed limited

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MEMSYS '15
MEMSYS '15: International Symposium on Memory Systems
October 5 - 8, 2015
DC, Washington DC, USA

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Towards Swap-Free, Continuous Ballooning for Fast, Cloud-Based Virtual Machine MigrationsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698543(269-283)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Meunik: Rethinking Virtual Machine Memory Resource Management for Unikernel-Based VMs2024 IEEE/ACM Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC)10.1109/SEC62691.2024.00030(292-305)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
  • (2022)Live migration of virtual machine memory content in networked systemsComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2022.108898209(108898)Online publication date: May-2022
  • (2021)Progressive Memory Adjustment with Performance Guarantee in Virtualized SystemsProceedings of the 50th International Conference on Parallel Processing10.1145/3472456.3472491(1-11)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2021
  • (2021)Extending Intel PML for hardware-assisted working set size estimation of VMsProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments10.1145/3453933.3454018(111-124)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2021
  • (2019)Adaptive Resource Views for ContainersProceedings of the 28th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing10.1145/3307681.3325403(243-254)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2019
  • (2019)SmarTmem: Intelligent Management of Transcendent Memory in a Virtualized Server2019 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)10.1109/IPDPSW.2019.00151(911-920)Online publication date: May-2019
  • (2018)Working Set Size Estimation Techniques in Virtualized EnvironmentsProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/31794222:1(1-22)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2018
  • (2016)Review of Virtual Memory Optimization in Cloud Environment2016 International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems (INCoS)10.1109/INCoS.2016.106(53-58)Online publication date: Sep-2016
  • (2016)FCMS: A fuzzy controller for CPU and memory consolidation under SLA constraintsConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.396829:5Online publication date: 2-Dec-2016

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