Perspectives on Virtualized Resource Management

In little more than a decade, virtualization has evolved from an exotic mainframe technology to become the cornerstone of enterprise data centers and modern cloud-computing infrastructures. Much of virtualization's power derives from the extra level of indirection it introduces, but this is a double-edged sword. Consolidation inherently complicates performance isolation, and the hypervisor faces a semantic gap in trying to understand guest behavior. Despite many innovations, practical end-to-end control over application performance remains elusive.

This talk will focus on key challenges of virtualized resource management, drawing on examples from my own experiences in both research and product development. I will also highlight several promising approaches and new techniques aimed at achieving more autonomic resource management in virtualized systems.

Carl Waldspurger has been innovating in the area of resource management for more than two decades. He is active in the systems research community, and served as the program co-chair for the 2011 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Carl is currently working closely with several early-stage startups, including CloudPhysics and PrivateCore. For over a decade, he was responsible for core resource management and virtualization technologies at VMware. Carl led the design and implementation of processor scheduling and memory management for the ESX hypervisor, and was the architect for VMware's Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). Prior to VMware, he was a researcher at the DEC Systems Research Center. Carl holds a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, for which he received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.