AppBag: Application-Aware Bandwidth Allocation for Virtual Machines in Cloud Environment

Abstract

It is challenging to allocate the network bandwidth to virtual machines(VMs) hosting communication-intensive applications. Due to the temporal and spatial variability of the hosted applications, it is crucial how much bandwidth to be reserved for each VM and when to adjust it. Prior approaches typically resort to predicting the applications' network demands, according to which the VMs are placed once for all or periodically migrated. However, recent works conceded that the network demands of applications can only be accurately derived right before each execution phase. In this paper, we propose AppBag, an Application-aware Bandwidth guarantee framework which allocates the bandwidth to VMs using only one-stepahead information. An efficient VM migration algorithm is then proposed to adjust the bandwidth allocation and corresponding VM placement, subjected to the network demands variation in future execution phases. We further implement AppBag with OpenStack and deploy it on the testbed environment in our data center. Extensive evaluations using popular applications show that AppBag can handle the bandwidth requests at run-time while improving applications' performance and reducing the global traffic in the data center fabric.