Black-box performance models for virtualized Web service applications

Abstract

In order to reduce the operating costs of IT systems, nowadays service applications are executed in virtualized infrastructures and a time varying fraction of the physical servers' capacity is shared among running applications. The performance modelling of a virtualized server is very challenging as the impact of the choice of the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) scheduler, its parameters and I/O management overhead is still only partially understood. In this paper, black-box models based on the Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) framework are proposed for the run-time modelling and performance control of Web services in virtualized hosting environments. As the behavior of the application response time is highly time varying and the workload conditions substantially change within the same business day, LPV models seem very promising for predicting the performance of such systems. Specifically, the suitability of subspace LPV identification methods for multi-variable systems is investigated and their performance assessed on experimental data gathered on Xen environments. © 2009 ACM.