Prepartition: Paradigm for the Load Balance of Virtual Machine Allocation in Data Centers

It is significant to apply load-balancing strategy to improve the performance and reliability of resource in data centers. One of the challenging scheduling problems in Cloud data centers is to take the allocation and migration of reconfigurable virtual machines (VMs) as well as the integrated features of hosting physical machines (PMs) into consideration. In the reservation model, the workload of data centers has fixed process interval characteristics. In general, load-balance scheduling is NP-hard problem as proved in many open literatures. Traditionally, for offline load balance without migration, one of the best approaches is LPT (Longest Process Time first), which is well known to have approximation ratio 4/3. With virtualization, reactive (post) migration of VMs after allocation is one popular way for load balance and traffic consolidation. However, reactive migration has difficulty to reach predefined load balance objectives, and may cause interruption and instability of service and other associated costs. In view of this, we propose a new paradigm, called Prepartition, it proactively sets process-time bound for each request on each PM and prepares in advance to migrate VMs to achieve the predefined balance goal. Prepartition can reduce process time by preparing VM migration in advance and therefore reduce instability and achieve better load balance as desired. Trace-driven and synthetic simulation results show that Prepartition for offline scheduling has 10%-20% better performance than the well known load balancing algorithms with regard to average utilization, imbalance degree, makespan as well as capacity makespan. We also apply the Prepartition to online (PrepartitionOn) load balance and compare it with existing online scheduling algorithms, in which PrepartitionOn can improve 8%-20% performance with regard to average CPU utilization, imbalance degree, makespan as well as capacity makespan. Both theoretical and experimental results are provided.