Dynamic memory balancing for virtual machines

Virtualization essentially enables multiple operating systems and applications to run on one physical computer by multiplexing hardware resources. A key motivation for applying virtualization is to improve hardware resource utilization while maintaining reasonable quality of service. However, such a goal cannot be achieved without efficient resource management. Though most physical resources, such as processor cores and I/O devices, are shared among virtual machines using time slicing and can be scheduled flexibly based on priority, allocating an appropriate amount of main memory to virtual machines is more challenging. Different applications have different memory requirements. Even a single application shows varied working set sizes during its execution. An optimal memory management strategy under a virtualized environment thus needs to dynamically adjust memory allocation for each virtual machine, which further requires a prediction model that forecasts its host physical memory ne...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: VEE
• Authors: Weiming Zhao, Zhenlin Wang
• Keywords: Host Physical Memory, Memory Needs, VEE 2009, Virtual Machine, Virtualization