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Identifying Communication Patterns between Virtual Machines in Software-Defined Data Centers

Published: 10 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Modern cloud data centers typically exploit management strategies to reduce the overall energy consumption. While most of the solutions focus on the energy consumption due to computational elements, the advent of the Software-Defined Network paradigm opens the possibility for more complex strategies taking into account the network traffic exchange within the data center. However, a network-aware Virtual Machine (VM) allocation requires the knowledge of data communication patterns, so that VMs exchanging significant amount of data can be placed on the same physical host or on low cost communication paths. In Infrastructure as a Service data centers, the information about VMs traffic exchange is not easily available unless a specialized monitoring function is deployed over the data center infrastructure. The main contribution of this paper is a methodology to infer VMs communication patterns starting from input/output network traffic time series of each VM and without relaying on a special purpose monitoring. Our reference scenario is a software-defined data center hosting a multi-tier application deployed using horizontal replication. The proposed methodology has two main goals to support a network-aware VMs allocation: first, to identify couples of intensively communicating VMs through correlation-based analysis of the time series; second, to identify VMs belonging to the same vertical stack of a multi-tier application. We evaluate the methodology by comparing different correlation indexes, clustering algorithms and time granularities to monitor the network traffic. The experimental results demonstrate the capability of the proposed approach to identify interacting VMs, even in a challenging scenario where the traffic patterns are similar in every VM belonging to the same application tier.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review  Volume 44, Issue 4
March 2017
101 pages
ISSN:0163-5999
DOI:10.1145/3092819
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 May 2017
Published in SIGMETRICS Volume 44, Issue 4

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View all
  • (2023)Less is not more: We need rich datasets to exploreFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2022.12.022142(117-130)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2021)A Non-Cooperative Data Center Energy Consumption Optimization Strategy Based on SDN Structure2021 IEEE 20th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)10.1109/TrustCom53373.2021.00194(1386-1390)Online publication date: Oct-2021
  • (2020)An Improved Energy Saving Strategy for SDN-based Data Center2020 IEEE Intl Conf on Parallel & Distributed Processing with Applications, Big Data & Cloud Computing, Sustainable Computing & Communications, Social Computing & Networking (ISPA/BDCloud/SocialCom/SustainCom)10.1109/ISPA-BDCloud-SocialCom-SustainCom51426.2020.00204(1371-1376)Online publication date: Dec-2020
  • (2018)A Technique to Identify Data Exchange Between Cloud Virtual MachinesSystems Modeling: Methodologies and Tools10.1007/978-3-319-92378-9_13(201-219)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2018

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