Virtualization-Based Techniques for Enabling Multi-tenant Management Tools

As service providers strive to improve the quality and efficiency of their IT (information technology) management services, the need to adopt a standard set of tools and processes becomes increasingly important. Deploying multitenant capable tools is a key part of this standardization, since a single instance can be used to manage multiple customer environments, and multi-tenant tools have the potential to significantly reduce service-delivery costs. However, most tools are not designed for multi-tenancy, and providing this support requires extensive re-design and re-implementation. In this paper, we explore the use of virtualization technology to enable multitenancy for systems and network management tools with minimal, if any, changes to the tool software. We demonstrate our design techniques by creating a multitenant version of a widely-used open source network management system. We perform a number of detailed profiling experiments to measure the resource requirements in the virtual environments, and also compare the scalability of two multi-tenant realizations using different virtualization approaches. We show that our design can support roughly 20 customers with a single tool instance, and leads to a scalability increase of 60–90% over a traditional design in which each customer is assigned to a single virtual machine.