Jettison: Efficient Idle Desktop Consolidation with Partial VM Migration

Nilton Bila, Eyal de Lara, Kaustubh Joshi, H. Andres Lagar-Cavilla, Matti Hiltunen, M. Satyanarayanan

European Conference on Computer Systems (Eurosys), Bern, Switzerland, April 2012

 

Abstract

Idle desktop systems are frequently left powered, often because of applications that maintain network presence or to enable potential remote access. Unfortunately, an idle PC consumes up to 60% of its peak power. Solutions have been proposed that perform consolidation of idle desktop virtual machines. However, desktop VMs are often large requiring gigabytes of memory. Consolidating such VMs, creates bulk network transfers lasting in the order of minutes, and utilizes server memory inefficiently. When multiple VMs migrate simultaneously, each VM’s experienced migration latency grows, and this limits the use of VM consolidation to environments in which only a few daily migrations are expected for each VM. This paper introduces Partial VM Migration, a technique that transparently migrates only the working set of an idle VM. Jettison, our partial VM migration prototype, can deliver 85% to 104% of the energy savings of full VM migration, while using less than 10% as much network resources, and providing migration latencies that are two to three orders of magnitude smaller.

 

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