International Business Machines Corporation
Reprovisioning virtual machines by means of DVFS-aware scheduling

Abstract:

A method and associated systems use DVFS performance-scaling technology to satisfy quality-of-service performance requirements when recovering a job that had been scheduled to run on a failed virtual machine. A Buffer Time specifies a duration of time remaining, at the time of failure, for the job to complete in order to satisfy the quality-of-service requirements. Depending on relative durations of time required to repair the failed virtual machine, to perform the job on an unscaled active-mode virtual machine, and to transfer the job to another virtual machine, the system determines whether to repair the failed virtual machine or to transfer the job. If the latter, the system then determines whether to select a destination virtual machine provisioned on a DVFS-compliant platform and, if so, the system scales the DVFS-compliant platform's performance to a level sufficient to complete the job within the Buffer Time.