DMSS: A dynamic memory scheduling system in server consolidation environments

As the foundation of cloud computing, Server consolidation allows multiple computer infrastructures running as virtual machines in a single physical node. It improves the utilization of most kinds of resource but memory under x86 architecture. Because of inaccurate memory usage estimate and the lack of memory resource management, there is much service performance degradation in data centers, even though they have occupied a large amount of memory. Furthermore, memory becomes insufficient for a physical server when a lot of virtual machines depend on it. In order to improve this, we present a dynamic memory scheduling system called DMSS, which can manage memory resources in server consolidation environments and allocate memory among virtual machines on demand. We have designed and implemented the corresponding memory scheduling policy based on Xen virtualization platform to enhance memory efficiency and achieve service level agreement. The benchmark shows that DMSS can make an accurate and rapid response to memory changes and save more than 30% physical memory with less than 5% performance degradation. DMSS actually brings in economic benefits to cloud service providers because more virtual machines can be accommodated at lower costs. © 2012 IEEE.