Scalable and efficient workload hotspot detection in virtualized environment

Workload hotspot detection is a key component of virtual machine (VM) management in virtualized environment. One of its challenges is how to effectively collect the resource usage of VMs. Also, since data centers usually have hundreds or even thousands of nodes, workload hotspot detection must be able to handle a large amount of monitoring data. In this paper, we address these two challenges. We first present a novel approach to VM memory monitoring. This approach collects memory usage data by walking through the page tables of VMs and by checking the present bit of page table entry. Second, we present a MapReduce-based approach to efficiently analyze a large amount of resource usage data of VMs and nodes. Leveraging the power of parallelism and robustness of MapReduce can significantly accelerate the detection of hotspots. Extensive simulations have been performed to evaluate the proposed approaches. The simulation results show that our approach can achieve effective estimation of memory usage with low overhead and can quickly detect workload hotspots.