Affinity Aware VM Colocation Mechanism for Cloud

The most of the existing virtual machine (VM) placement algorithms do not consider the affinity i.e. dependency between the virtual machines. Also, in many existing virtualized systems it is found that the network bandwidth often becomes the bottleneck resource which can lead to the performance degradation of the applications deployed in the cloud. In this paper, we present an affinity aware VM colocation mechanism for cloud. The proposed mechanism find out the network affinity between the virtual machine pairs and colocate the virtual machine pairs having higher network affinity on the same physical host. The VM colocation helps to decrease the network overhead in the cloud and also helps to improve the performance of the communication intensive applications deployed in the cloud. The experimental results show that the runtime of the communication intensive applications, i.e. RUBiS and Twitter, is reduced by few seconds. Also, the network traffic between the virtual machines running the RUBiS application is reduced by 28% while the network traffic between the virtual machines running the Twitter application is reduced by 11%.