Free Network Measurement for Adaptive Virtual Machine Distributed Computing

An execution environment consisting of virtual machines (VMs) interconnected with a virtual overlay network can use the naturally occurring traffic of an existing, unmodified application running in the VMs to measure the underlying physical network. Based on these characterizations, and characterizations of the application’s own communication topology, the execution environment can optimize the execution of the application using application-independent means such as VM migration and overlay topology changes. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of such free automatic network measurement by fusing the Wren passive monitoring and analysis system with Virtuoso’s virtual networking system. We explain how Wren has been extended to support on-line analysis, and we explain how Virtuoso’s adaptation algorithms have been enhanced to use Wren’s physical network level information to choose VM-to-host mappings, overlay topology, and forwarding rules. Effort sponsored by the National Science Foundation under Grants ANI-0093221, ACI-0112891, ANI0301108, ACI-0203974, EIA-0130869, EIA-0224449, and gifts from VMware, Sun, and Dell. This work was performed in part using computational facilities at the College of William and Mary that were enabled by grants from Sun Microsystems, the National Science Foundation, and Virginia’s Commonwealth Technology Research Fund. Zangrilli is partially supported by an Aerospace Graduate Research Fellowship from the Virginia Space Grant Consortium. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Virginia, VMware, Sun, or Dell. * Northwestern University Computer Science Department Free Network Measurement For Adaptive Virtualized Distributed Computing Ashish Gupta Marcia Zangrilli Ananth Sundararaj Peter Dinda Bruce B. Lowekamp