Memory buddies: exploiting page sharing for smart colocation in virtualized data centers

Many data center virtualization solutions, such as VMware ESX, employ content-based page sharing to consolidate the resources of multiple servers. Page sharing identifies virtual machine memory pages with identical content and consolidates them into a single shared page. This technique, implemented at the host level, applies only between VMs placed on a given physical host. In a multiserver data center, opportunities for sharing may be lost because the VMs holding identical pages are resident on different hosts. In order to obtain the full benefit of content-based page sharing it is necessary to place virtual machines such that VMs with similar memory content are located on the same hosts. In this paper we present Memory Buddies, a memory sharingaware placement system for virtual machines. This system includes a memory fingerprinting system to efficiently determine the sharing potential among a set of VMs, and compute more efficient placements. In addition it makes use of live mi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: VEE
• Authors: Timothy Wood, Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin, Prashant J. Shenoy, Peter Desnoyers, Emmanuel Cecchet, Mark D. Corner
• Keywords: Data Center, Page Sharing, VEE 2009, Virtual Machines, Virtualization