VBoom: Creating a virtual machine real estate boom

Abstract

Cloud providers sell identically configured virtual machines (VMs) for the same price. Customers purchasing these VMs expect that they perform similarly and are allocated the same amount of virtual resources. In practice, however, the real performance of identically provisioned VMs depends on the underlying hardware, i.e., how the hardware is configured, and how much shared resources are consumed by co-located VMs. As workloads often have different resource requirements (e.g., CPU or disk I/O bound), a physical machine can be a better host to one VM than another, and swapping the locations of the two VMs can improve the performance (or any other metrics) of both VMs. However, cloud providers are unlikely to offer a VM swapping service since it is a tacit admission of providing different quality of services while charging the same rate. We propose, VBoom, a cloud provider-agnostic system in which VMs can dynamically relocate themselves (via location swapping) in a cloud environment if the new location better serves the needs of the VM. We discuss technical and business benefits and challenges in building such a system. When location matters, we believe that through VBoom, real estate of virtual machines can be established in a completely market-driven fashion. © 2013 IEEE.