Arnupharp Viratanapanu’s research while affiliated with The University of Tokyo and other places

Pantau is an on demand resource monitoring system that has the goal of providing data necessary for studying KVM based server consolidation environment. Instead of always collecting all resource values from all machines, users are able to control which values should be collected from which machines without having to modify any configuration files. This greatly reduces the overhead of our system. The evaluation of expected usage scenarios shows that our system consumes less than 1.8% CPU on a physical machine that hosts 8 VMs at 10 seconds monitoring interval. In addition to normal resource usages, it provides per VM process resource usage which captures the resource usage of all VM processes on target machines at a given time interval. Using Pantau, researchers can understand better the correlation between resource usages of related machines and also the correlation between application performance parameters and necessary resources. Pantau can be easily extended to monitor unsupported resource values. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of our monitoring system along with a case study that shows how we can make use of the monitored data.

Server consolidation and virtualization technology are used in modern data center as a method to improve the server utilization rate by encouraging the sharing of physical resources between virtual machines (VM). Although, this can be realized by plenty of virtualization softwares available in markets, creating a good management policy for the server consolidation environment is still a challenging research problem. The policy should be able to maintain the high resource sharing rate, while keeping the performance drop rate as low as possible, which are totally contradict requirements. In order to progress the research in this area, a monitoring system, which can effectively monitor current system state and collect essential information, is indispensable. However, due to many differences in use case scenarios, monitoring systems designed for conventional management domain cannot be applied directly. This needs us to reconsider the design of the monitoring system. This paper proposes some key information that is still missing from existing monitoring systems as well as the design of Pantau, a monitoring system designed for capturing information necessary for server consolidation.