Cloud Scale Resource Management: Challenges and Techniques

Managing resources at large scale while providing performance isolation and efficient use of underlying hardware is a key challenge for any cloud management software. Most virtual machine (VM) resource management systems like VMware DRS clusters, Microsoft PRO and Eucalyptus, do not currently scale to the number of hosts and VMs supported by cloud service providers. In addition to scale, other challenges include heterogeneity of systems, compatibility constraints between virtual machines and underlying hardware, islands of resources created due to storage and network connectivity and limited scale of storage resources. In this paper, we shed light on some of the key issues in building cloud-scale resource management systems, based on five years of research and shipping cluster resource management products. Furthermore, we discuss various techniques to provide large scale resource management, along with the pros and cons of each technique. We hope to motivate future research in this area to develop practical solutions to these issues.