Introduction

Today I had a first meeting about my research project for this year, last year I decided to do this again with Sam Verboven as my supervisor. I look forward to working on the project and hope it will be learnful. I'll try to keep this blog up to date with the progress that is being made.

The assignment consists of building a 'blackbox' application which uses information about the applications that are running in a virtualized environment. It should make decisions about when to migrate a virtual machine for a certain application. This is the case when the VM starts to interfere with other VMs too much. When the load becomes too low on the other hand, decisions about the consolidation of VMs should be made.
The input for this application consists of the following information gathered from the different VMs/the system:
- average CPU utilization
- cache hits and misses
- virtual machine switches per second
- I/O blocks per second
- disk reading and writing time per VM
This gathering of information should have a minimal impact on the system: low resource usage of the application and should require no (or minimal) adaptation of DomU. This information about the loads could also be important for getting the required input information for my thesis project (where this data is initially considered as known).

The first steps this week will be to read the paper "An Analysis of Performance Interference Effects in Virtualized Enviroments", follow Sams tutorial to set up a test system with the required tools and patch the latest Xen kernel such that XenOProfile works fine.