Quantum virtual machine: power and performance management in virtualized web servers clusters

This paper presents a model for managing virtual machines (VMs) on web servers clusters, in addition to providing energy savings, our model has linear scalability and is independent of the processing platform. We define a default processing virtual web server, named as quantum virtual machine (QVM). A set of QVM performs a logical web server, which operates in a flexible manner, changing its performance and power consumption depending on the workload of the applications. Concepts of agile VM clone, co-allocation of VMs in the same core, and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling are used in the model, enabling rapid configuration actions and a fine-grained QoS control. Experiments evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model by means of power consumption reduction and QoS violations as compared to the Linux CPU governors and state-of-the-art energy-aware approaches based on optimization. The results show our model conserves up to 51.8% of the energy required by a cluster designed for peak workload scenario, with a negligible impact on the applications performance.