Date: November 27, 1:30 PM.
Location: Carleton University, 4359 ME (Mackenzie Building) Campus map

Title: Towards a Unified Theory of VM Placement

Prof. Umesh Bellur,
Dept. of Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Abstract: Existing virtual machine (VM) placement schemes have measured their effectiveness by measuring how well they conserve either Physical Machine?s resources (CPU, memory) or the network resource but not both. However, real applications use all resource types to varying degrees. The result of applying existing placement schemes to VMs running real applications is a fragmented data center where resources along one dimension become unusable even though they are available because of the unavailability of resources along other dimensions. An example of this fragmentation is unusable CPU because of a bottlenecked network link from the physical machine which has available CPU. To date, evaluations of the efficacy of VM placement schemes has not recognized this fragmentation and it?s ill effects, let alone try to measure it and avoid it. In this talk, I will first define the term ?relative resource fragmentation? and illustrate how it can be measured in a data center. The metric we put forth for capturing the degree of fragmentation is comprehensive and includes all key data center resource types. We then propose a scheme of minimizing this fragmentation so as to maximize the availability of existing set of data center resources. Results of empirical evaluations of our placement scheme compared to existing network based placement schemes show a reduction of fragmentation by as much as 15% and increase in number of successfully placed applications by upto 20%.

Bio: Umesh Bellur is a professor computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in India. His areas of research include virtualization and cloud computing, distributed event based systems and data center management. He has received the IBM Faculty award as well as the SAP Research innovation award for his work on autonomic management of enterprise applications as well as a number of grants from IBM, Motorola, Netapp and other leading enterprises for his work in virtualization and cloud computing. He is currently on a sabbatical from IIT Bombay and is a visiting professor at Purdue University, CIS.

Prior to joining IIT Bombay, Prof. Umesh was a entrepreneur in silicon valley where he co-founded Collation Inc. in 2001, that built software products to manage enterprise application deployments in large data centers. Collation was subsequently acquired by IBM in 2004. He has a Ph.D. from Syracuse University.