Virtual machine cluster mobility in inter-cloud platforms

Modern cloud computing applications developed from different interoperable services that are interfacing with each other in a loose coupling approach. This work proposes the concept of the Virtual Machine (VM) cluster migration, meaning that services could be migrated to various clouds based on different constraints such as computational resources and better economical offerings. Since cloud services are instantiated as VMs, an application can be seen as a cluster of VMs that integrate its functionality. We focus on the VM cluster migration by exploring a more sophisticated method with regards to VM network configurations. In particular, networks are hard to managed because their internal setup is changed after a migration, and this is related with the configuration parameters during the re-instantiation to the new cloud platform. To address such issue, we introduce a Software Defined Networking (SDN) service that breaks the problem of network configuration into tractable pieces and involves virtual bridges instead of references to static endpoints. The architecture is modular, it is based on the SDN OpenFlow protocol and allows VMs to be paired in cluster groups that communicate with each other independently of the cloud platform that are deployed. The experimental analysis demonstrates migrations of VM clusters and provides a detailed discussion of service performance for different cases.     

Integrating QoS awareness with virtualization in cloud computing systems for delay-sensitive applications

Cloud computing provides scalable computing and storage resources over the Internet. These scalable resources can be dynamically organized as many virtual machines (VMs) to run user applications based on a pay-per-use basis. The required resources of a VM are sliced from a physical machine (PM) in the cloud computing system. A PM may hold one or more VMs. When a cloud provider would like to create a number of VMs, the main concerned issue is the VM placement problem, such that how to place these VMs at appropriate PMs to provision their required resources of VMs. However, if two or more VMs are placed at the same PM, there exists certain degree of interference between these VMs due to sharing non-sliceable resources, e.g. I/O resources. This phenomenon is called as the VM interference. The VM interference will affect the performance of applications running in VMs, especially the delay-sensitive applications. The delay-sensitive applications have quality of service (QoS) requirements in their data access delays. This paper investigates how to integrate QoS awareness with virtualization in cloud computing systems, such as the QoS-aware VM placement (QAVMP) problem. In addition to fully exploiting the resources of PMs, the QAVMP problem considers the QoS requirements of user applications and the VM interference reduction. Therefore, in the QAVMP problem, there are following three factors: resource utilization, application QoS, and VM interference. We first formulate the QAVMP problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model by integrating the three factors as the profit of cloud provider. Due to the computation complexity of the ILP model, we propose a polynomial-time heuristic algorithm to efficiently solve the QAVMP problem. In the heuristic algorithm, a bipartite graph is modeled to represent all the possible placement relationships between VMs and PMs. Then, the VMs are gradually placed at their preferable PMs to maximize the profit of cloud provider as much as possible. Finally, simulation experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic algorithm by comparing with other VM placement algorithms.     

云计算环境下的虚拟机快速克隆技术

虚拟机克隆技术是指在云计算环境下快速复制出多个虚拟机（VM）并将这些VM分发到多台物理主机上,克隆出来的VM共享相同的初始状态然后独立运行提供服务。虚拟机克隆使得云计算提供商能够快速有效地部署系统资源。给出了一种虚拟机快速克隆方法,利用写时拷贝技术来创建虚拟磁盘和内存状态的快照,然后用按需分配内存技术和多点传送技术来请求和传输这些状态信息。在C3云平台上的实验表明,此方法在不中断源虚拟机中运行服务的情况下,实现了云计算中的快速虚拟机克隆。     

VM consolidation: A real case based on OpenStack Cloud

In recent years, Cloud computing has been emerging as the next big revolution in both computer networks and Web provisioning. Because of raised expectations, several vendors, such as Amazon and IBM, started designing, developing, and deploying Cloud solutions to optimize the usage of their own data centers, and some open-source solutions are also underway, such as Eucalyptus and OpenStack. Cloud architectures exploit virtualization techniques to provision multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on the same physical host, so as to efficiently use available resources, for instance, to consolidate VMs in the minimal number of physical servers to reduce the runtime power consumption. VM consolidation has to carefully consider the aggregated resource consumption of co-located VMs, in order to avoid performance reductions and Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations. While various works have already treated the VM consolidation problem from a theoretical perspective, this paper focuses on it from a more practical viewpoint, with specific attention on the consolidation aspects related to power, CPU, and networking resource sharing. Moreover, the paper proposes a Cloud management platform to optimize VM consolidation along three main dimensions, namely power consumption, host resources, and networking. Reported experimental results point out that interferences between co-located VMs have to be carefully considered to avoid placement solutions that, although being feasible from a more theoretical viewpoint, cannot ensure VM provisioning with SLA guarantees.     

HPC Cloud环境中基于网络Ⅰ/O负载的虚拟机放置算法

随着虚拟化技术和云计算技术的发展,越来越多的高性能计算应用运行在云计算资源上.在基于虚拟化技术的高性能计算云系统中,高性能计算应用运行在多个虚拟机之中,这些虚拟机可能放置在不同的物理节点上.若多个通信密集型作业的虚拟机放置在相同的物理节点上,虚拟机之间将竞争物理节点的网络Ⅰ/O资源,如果虚拟机对网络Ⅰ/O资源的需求超过物理节点的网络Ⅰ/O带宽上限,将严重影响通信密集型作业的计算性能.针对虚拟机对网络Ⅰ/O资源的竞争问题,提出一种基于网络Ⅰ/O负载均衡的虚拟机放置算法NLPA,该算法采用网络Ⅰ/O负载均衡策略来减少虚拟机对网络Ⅰ/O资源的竞争.实验表明,与贪心算法进行比较,对于同样的高性能计算作业测试集,NLPA算法在完成作业的计算时间、系统中的网络Ⅰ/O负载吞吐率、网络Ⅰ/O负载均衡3个方面均有更好的表现.     

Exploiting ensemble techniques for automatic virtual machine clustering in cloud systems

Cloud computing has recently emerged as a new paradigm to provide computing services through large-size data centers where customers may run their applications in a virtualized environment. The advantages of cloud in terms of flexibility and economy encourage many enterprises to migrate from local data centers to cloud platforms, thus contributing to the success of such infrastructures. However, as size and complexity of cloud infrastructures grow, scalability issues arise in monitoring and management processes. Scalability issues are exacerbated because available solutions typically consider each virtual machine (VM) as a black box with independent characteristics, which is monitored at a fine-grained granularity level for management purposes, thus generating huge amounts of data to handle. We claim that scalability issues can be addressed by leveraging the similarity between VMs in terms of resource usage patterns. In this paper, we propose an automated methodology to cluster similar VMs starting from their resource usage information, assuming no knowledge of the software executed on them. This is an innovative methodology that combines the Bhattacharyya distance and ensemble techniques to provide a stable evaluation of similarity between probability distributions of multiple VM resource usage, considering both system- and network-related data. We evaluate the methodology through a set of experiments on data coming from an enterprise data center. We show that our proposal achieves high and stable performance in automatic VMs clustering, with a significant reduction in the amount of data collected which allows to lighten the monitoring requirements of a cloud data center.     

Effects of Reducing VMs Management Times on Elastic Applications

Cloud infrastructures provide computing resources to applications in the form of Virtual Machines (VMs). Many applications deployed in cloud resources have an elastic behavior, that is, they change the number of servers (VMs) dynamically, adapting the application to the workload. Scaling-out and scaling-in operations are managed by an auto-scaler module, which can be reactive (adapting the number of VMs to the current workload) or proactive (adapting to the expected future workload). The cloud infrastructure provides a management interface to create (deploy) and destroy (shutdown) server instances, operations that require some time to complete. In this work we evaluate to what extent the reduction of the time required by VM management operations, namely deployment and shutdown, impacts the performance of applications and the behavior of reactive and proactive auto-scaling policies. After establishing several ideal boundaries on the use of resources, we carry out a set of experiments that show how short management times drastically reduce the use of resources, while allowing the application to operate within the required performance bounds.     

Providing Virtual Cloud for Special Purposes on Demand in JointCloud Computing Environment

Cloud computing has been widely adopted by enterprises because of its on-demand and elastic resource usage paradigm. Currently most cloud applications are running on one single cloud. However, more and more applications demand to run across several clouds to satisfy the requirements like best cost efficiency, avoidance of vender lock-in, and geolocation sensitive service. JointCloud computing is a new research initiated by Chinese institutes to address the computing issues concerned with multiple clouds. In JointCloud, users’ diverse and dynamic requirements on cloud resources are satisfied by providing users virtual cloud (VC) for special purposes. A virtual cloud for special purposes is in essence a user’s specific cloud working environment having the customized software stacks, configurations and computing resources readily available. This paper first introduces what is JointCloud computing and then describes the design rationales, motivation examples, mechanisms and enabling technologies of VC in JointCloud.     

vSpec: workload-adaptive operating system specialization for virtual machines in cloud computing云计算环境下负载自适应的虚拟机操作系统定制化

In general, operating systems (OSs) are designed to mediate access to device hardware by applications. They process different kinds of system calls using an indiscriminate kernel with the same configuration. Applications in cloud computing platforms are constructed from service components. Each of the service components is assigned separately to an individual virtual machine (VM), which leads to homogeneous system calls on each VM. In addition, the requirements for kernel function and configuration of system parameters from different VMs are different. Therefore, the suit-to-all design incurs an unnecessary performance overhead and restricts the OS’s processing capacity in cloud computing. In this paper, we propose an adaptive model for cloud computing to resolve the conflict between generality and performance. Our model adaptively specializes the OS of a VM according to the resource-consuming characteristics of workloads on the VM. We implement a prototype of the adaptive model, vSpec. There are five classes of VM: CPU-intensive, memory-intensive, I/O-intensive, networkintensive and compound, according to the resource-consuming characteristics of the workloads running on the VMs. vSpec specializes the OS of a VM according to the VM class. We perform comprehensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of vSpec on benchmarks and real-world applications.     

Improving Scalability of Cloud Monitoring Through PCA-Based Clustering of Virtual Machines简

Cloud computing has recently emerged as a leading paradigm to allow customers to run their applications in virtualized large-scale data centers. Existing solutions for monitoring and management of these infrastructures consider virtual machines （VMs） as independent entities with their own characteristics. However, these approaches suffer from scalability issues due to the increasing number of VMs in modern cloud data centers. We claim that scalability issues can bc addressed by leveraging the similarity among VMs behavior in terms of resource usage patterns. In this paper we propose an automated methodology to cluster VMs starting from the usage of multiple resources, assuming no knowledge of the services executed on them. The innovative contribution of the proposed methodology is the use of the statistical technique known as principal component analysis （PCA） to automatically select the most relevant information to cluster similar VMs. We apply the methodology to two case studies, a virtualized testbed and a real enterprise data center. In both case studies, the automatic data selection based on PCA allows us to achieve high performance, with a percentage of correctly clustered VMs between 80% and 100% even for short time series （1 day） of monitored data. Furthermore, we estimate the potential reduction in the amount of collected data to demonstrate how our proposal may address the scalability issues related to monitoring and management in cloud computing data centers.     

混合云中的一个高效协调器

云计算提供了4种部署模型:公有云、私有云、社区云和混合云.通常,一个私有云中可用的资源是有限的,因此云用户不得不从公有云租用资源.这意味着云用户将会产生额外的费用.越来越多的企业选择混合云来部署它们的应用.在混合云中,为了实现用户的利益最大化,必须满足使用资源的费用最小化和用户的QoS,为此为混合云用户提供了一个既能最小化资源费用又能保证满足QoS的资源分配方法.实验结果表明,该算法在保持低操作成本的同时还满足了用户的QoS.     

CloudSim: a toolkit for modeling and simulation of cloud computing environments and evaluation of resource provisioning algorithms

Cloud computing is a recent advancement wherein IT infrastructure and applications are provided as ‘services’ to end‐users under a usage‐based payment model. It can leverage virtualized services even on the fly based on requirements (workload patterns and QoS) varying with time. The application services hosted under Cloud computing model have complex provisioning, composition, configuration, and deployment requirements. Evaluating the performance of Cloud provisioning policies, application workload models, and resources performance models in a repeatable manner under varying system and user configurations and requirements is difficult to achieve. To overcome this challenge, we propose CloudSim: an extensible simulation toolkit that enables modeling and simulation of Cloud computing systems and application provisioning environments. The CloudSim toolkit supports both system and behavior modeling of Cloud system components such as data centers, virtual machines (VMs) and resource provisioning policies. It implements generic application provisioning techniques that can be extended with ease and limited effort. Currently, it supports modeling and simulation of Cloud computing environments consisting of both single and inter‐networked clouds (federation of clouds). Moreover, it exposes custom interfaces for implementing policies and provisioning techniques for allocation of VMs under inter‐networked Cloud computing scenarios. Several researchers from organizations, such as HP Labs in U.S.A., are using CloudSim in their investigation on Cloud resource provisioning and energy‐efficient management of data center resources. The usefulness of CloudSim is demonstrated by a case study involving dynamic provisioning of application services in the hybrid federated clouds environment. The result of this case study proves that the federated Cloud computing model significantly improves the application QoS requirements under fluctuating resource and service demand patterns. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于云计算背景下的计算机网络安全研究

云计算可以用于商业计算方法,它可以使计算指令发给很多计算机组建的资源池上,使用客户可以按照自己的去求得到想要的计算方式、存储空间和信息服务,客户可以从逻辑底层硬件、网络协议和软件中更好的解脱出来。我们在使用计算机技术中,肯定存在信息安全问题,所以我们需要加强计算机网络信息安全及防护。同时也要深入探讨和分析计算机网络防护以及安全。因此,本文主要就云计算背景下环计算机网络安全进行研究和讨论。也会主要说明做好计算机网络安全防范的重要性,希望可以在保证资源信息共享的情况下,使运行稳定,还可以使用户的生活和工作更加便捷。     

URL: A unified reinforcement learning approach for autonomic cloud management

Cloud computing is emerging as an increasingly important service-oriented computing paradigm. Management is a key to providing accurate service availability and performance data, as well as enabling real-time provisioning that automatically provides the capacity needed to meet service demands. In this paper, we present a unified reinforcement learning approach, namely URL, to automate the configuration processes of virtualized machines and appliances running in the virtual machines. The approach lends itself to the application of real-time autoconfiguration of clouds. It also makes it possible to adapt the VM resource budget and appliance parameter settings to the cloud dynamics and the changing workload to provide service quality assurance. In particular, the approach has the flexibility to make a good trade-off between system-wide utilization objectives and appliance-specific SLA optimization goals. Experimental results on Xen VMs with various workloads demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. It can drive the system into an optimal or near-optimal configuration setting in a few trial-and-error iterations.     

From cloud computing to cloud manufacturing

Cloud computing is changing the way industries and enterprises do their businesses in that dynamically scalable and virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. This model creates a brand new opportunity for enterprises. In this paper, some of the essential features of cloud computing are briefly discussed with regard to the end-users, enterprises that use the cloud as a platform, and cloud providers themselves. Cloud computing is emerging as one of the major enablers for the manufacturing industry; it can transform the traditional manufacturing business model, help it to align product innovation with business strategy, and create intelligent factory networks that encourage effective collaboration. Two types of cloud computing adoptions in the manufacturing sector have been suggested, manufacturing with direct adoption of cloud computing technologies and cloud manufacturing—the manufacturing version of cloud computing. Cloud computing has been in some of key areas of manufacturing such as IT, pay-as-you-go business models, production scaling up and down per demand, and flexibility in deploying and customizing solutions. In cloud manufacturing, distributed resources are encapsulated into cloud services and managed in a centralized way. Clients can use cloud services according to their requirements. Cloud users can request services ranging from product design, manufacturing, testing, management, and all other stages of a product life cycle.     

Multi-objective Swarm Intelligence schedulers for online scientific Clouds

Cloud Computing is a promising paradigm for parallel computing. However, as Cloud-based services become more dynamic, resource provisioning in Clouds becomes more challenging. The paradigm, with its promise of virtually infinite resources, seems to suit well in solving resource greedy scientific computing problems. In a Cloud, an appropriate number of Virtual Machines (VM) is created and allocated in physical resources for executing jobs. This work focuses on the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model where custom VMs are launched in appropriate hosts available in a Cloud to execute scientific experiments coming from multiple users. Finding optimal solutions to allocate VMs to physical resources is an NP-complete problem, and therefore many heuristics have been developed. In this work, we describe and evaluate two Cloud schedulers based on Swarm Intelligence (SI) techniques, particularly Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The main performance metrics to study are the number of serviced users by the Cloud and the total number of created VMs in online (non-batch) scheduling scenarios. We also perform a sensitivity analysis by varying the specific-parameter values of each algorithm to evaluate the impact on the performance of the two objective metrics. The intra-Cloud network traffic is also measured. Simulated experiments performed using CloudSim and job data from real scientific problems show that the use of SI-based techniques succeeds in balancing the studied metrics compared to Genetic Algorithms.     

Performance analysis of cloud computing services considering resources sharing among virtual machines

Cloud computing is a novel paradigm for the provision of service on demand. Through the use of virtualization, physical resources are converted into “resources pool” which provides service on demand. Due to the complexity and diversity of user requests of the cloud computing system, its performance is difficult to model and analyze. Although there are some researches on cloud service performance, very few of them addressed the issues of resources sharing among VMs and its impact on service performance. This paper presents a model for performance analysis of cloud services. The model considers the resources sharing among VMs. In addition, various types of failures, such as VMs failures, physical servers failures and network failures are also considered. The service requests are also relaxed compared with prior research. A service request is divided into many subtasks and each subtask consists of a series of data processing and transmission. The average service time of service requests is obtained. And a numerical example is presented.     

基于云的计算机取证系统研究

云计算是目前最流行的互联网计算模式,它具有弹性计算、资源虚拟化、按需服务等特点。在云计算的环境中,云计算中心直接提供由基础设施、平台、应用等组成的各种服务,用户不再拥有自己的基础设施、软件和数据,而是共享整个云基础架构。这种方式直接影响了云计算环境的安全性和可用性,给云计算带来了巨大的隐患。在分析和研究云计算环境下的安全缺陷和安全威胁的前提下,提出了一种基于云的计算机取证系统的设计方案———利用计算机取证技术解决云计算环境的安全问题,同时利用云计算技术和超算技术满足传统取证对高性能计算的需求。     

Anomaly detection and identification scheme for VM live migration in cloud infrastructure

Virtual machines (VM) offer simple and practical mechanisms to address many of the manageability problems of leveraging heterogeneous computing resources. VM live migration is an important feature of virtualization in cloud computing: it allows administrators to transparently tune the performance of the computing infrastructure. However, VM live migration may open the door to security threats. Classic anomaly detection schemes such as Local Outlier Factors (LOF) fail in detecting anomalies in the process of VM live migration. To tackle such critical security issues, we propose an adaptive scheme that mines data from the cloud infrastructure in order to detect abnormal statistics when VMs are migrated to new hosts. In our scheme, we extend classic Local Outlier Factors (LOF) approach by defining novel dimension reasoning (DR) rules as DR-LOF to figure out the possible sources of anomalies. We also incorporate Symbolic Aggregate ApproXimation (SAX) to enable timing information exploration that LOF ignores. In addition, we implement our scheme with an adaptive procedure to reduce chances of performance instability. Compared with LOF that fails in detecting anomalies in the process of VM live migration, our scheme is able not only to detect anomalies but also to identify their possible sources, giving cloud computing operators important clues to pinpoint and clear the anomalies. Our scheme further outperforms other classic clustering tools in WEKA (Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis) with higher detection rates and lower false alarm rate. Our scheme would serve as a novel anomaly detection tool to improve security framework in VM management for cloud computing.