A Remote Memory Sharing System for Virtualized Computing Infrastructures

Resource management is a critical issue in today’s virtualized computing infrastructures. Consolidation is the main technique used to optimize such infrastructure. Regarding memory management, it allows gathering overloaded and underloaded VM on the same server so that memory can be mutualized. However, because of infrastructures constraints and complexity of managing multiple resources, consolidation can hardly optimize memory management. In this article, we propose to rely on a remote memory sharing for mutualizing memory. We implemented a system which monitors the working set of virtual machines, reclaims unused memory and makes it available (as a remote swap device) for virtual machines which need memory. Our evaluations with HPC and Big Data benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. We show that remote memory can improve the performance of a standard Spark benchmark by up the 17 percent with an average performance degradation of 1.5 percent (for the providing application).