VIRTUAL MACHINE PLACEMENT TO IMPROVE MEMORY UTILIZATION

• US 20120254860A1
• Filed: 03/28/2011
• Published: 10/04/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 03/28/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Bozek, James J., Hansson, Nils Peter Joachim, Suffern, Edward S., Wooldridge, James L.
• Granted Patent: US 8,490,091 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 718/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/4557 Distribution of virtual machine instances; Migration and load balancing
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2009/45583 Memory management, e.g. access or allocation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/45558 Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/461 Saving or restoring of program or task context
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/5033 considering data affinity

Abstract

Virtual machines having a high amount of identical memory pages are grouped under a common hypervisor to enable greater memory savings as the result of transparent page sharing. One embodiment provides a computer program product including computer usable program code for performing a method that comprises analyzing the software image content of a plurality of virtual machines running on a plurality of hypervisors in a common migration domain, identifying two or more of the virtual machines having greater than a threshold amount of common memory pages, placing the two or more virtual machines under a common hypervisor, and sharing the common memory pages among the two or more virtual machines. Optionally, the identifying of two or more of the virtual machines may include identifying two or more of the virtual machines having the same software image content classifications; thereby, identifying images with a greater affinity for common memory pages.

Claims

1-15. -15. (canceled)

16. A computer program product including computer usable program code embodied on a computer usable storage medium, the computer program product comprising:

computer usable program code for analyzing the software image content of a plurality of virtual machines running on a plurality of hypervisors in a common migration domain;

computer usable program code for identifying two or more of the virtual machines having greater than a threshold amount of common memory pages;

computer usable program code for placing the two or more virtual machines under a common hypervisor; and

computer usable program code for sharing the common memory pages among the two or more virtual machines.

17. The computer program product of claim 16, wherein the computer usable program code for placing the two or more virtual machines under a common hypervisor, includes computer usable program code for dynamically migrating a first of the two or more virtual machines to a physical server running a second of the two or more virtual machines.

18. The computer program product of claim 16, further comprising:

computer usable program code for increasing the amount of common memory pages between a first virtual machine and a second virtual machine by moving a workload of the first virtual machine from a first operating system to a second operating system that is used by the workload of the second virtual machine.