Sandpiper: Black-box and gray-box resource management for virtual machines

Virtualization can provide significant benefits in data centers by enabling dynamic virtual machine resizing and migration to eliminate hotspots. We present Sandpiper, a system that automates the task of monitoring and detecting hotspots, determining a new mapping of physical to virtual resources, resizing virtual machines to their new allocations, and initiating any necessary migrations. Sandpiper implements a black-box approach that is fully OS- and application-agnostic and a gray-box approach that exploits OS- and application-level statistics. We implement our techniques in Xen and conduct a detailed evaluation using a mix of CPU, network and memory-intensive applications. Our results show that Sandpiper is able to resolve single server hotspots within 20 s and scales well to larger, data center environments. We also show that the gray-box approach can help Sandpiper make more informed decisions, particularly in response to memory pressure.