Prediction-based Dynamic Resource Scheduling for Virtualized Cloud Systems

Virtualization and cloud computing technologies now make it possible to consolidate multiple online services, which are packed in virtual machines (VMs), into a smaller number of physical servers. However, it is still a challenging scheduling problem for cloud provider to dynamically manage the resource for VMs in order to handle variable workloads without service level agreement (SLA) violation. In this paper, we introduce a Prediction-based Dynamic Resource Scheduling (PDRS) solution to automate elastic resource scaling for virtualized cloud systems. Unlike traditional static consolidation or threshold-driven reactive scheduling, we both consider the dynamic workload fluctuations of each VM and the resource conflict handling problem. PDRS first employs an online resource prediction, which is a VM resource demand state predictor based on the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model, to achieve adaptive resource allocation for cloud applications on each VM. Then we propose our prediction-based dynamic resource scheduling algorithms to dynamically consolidate the VMs with adaptive resource allocation to reduce the number of physical machines. Extensive experimental results show that our scheduling is able to realize automatic elastic resource allocation with acceptable effect on SLAs.