Revisiting the management control plane in virtualized cloud computing infrastructure

Abstract

Previous research in virtualization has demonstrated that the management of a virtualized datacenter is a workload by itself, over and above the applications running in the virtualized datacenter. Virtualization has become more prevalent as the backbone of various cloud computing environments, and the workflows used in cloud computing are slightly different from typical datacenter workflows. In this paper, we profile the management workload induced by cloud-computing environments. Specifically, we analyze results from two real-world self-service cloud computing setups. Our results show that using the most recent virtualization techniques for conserving data bandwidth requirements in clouds, the management control plane now becomes a significant limiting factor in deploying cloud resources. We demonstrate that the rate of VM provisioning in clouds demands more aggressive means of performing previously infrequent operations like cloud reconfiguration, and these demands may influence virtualized datacenter design.