On the Comparison of Resource Usage of Applications in Physical and Virtual Environments

As the development of cloud computing advances, increasing number of enterprises start to move their existing physical machine hosted applications to virtualized cloud environments. However, virtualization technology will cause extra overhead while running application in virtual environment. Thus, knowing about resource consumption of the application in virtualization environment becomes an important issue. Each application has own performance goal, which will be defined in service level agreement (SLA). According resource consumption and SLA of the application, we’d like to answer the following question: “How much resources are necessary to be allocated to the application in the virtualized environment given workload subject to its target performance goals?” In this thesis, we focus on finding out the relationship of resource consumption of the specific class of application running in physical and virtual environment. Hence, the application can be allocated appropriate resource while moving from physical into cloud. In order to know the resource consumption (i.e. CPU usage) of application running in virtual environment, we propose a miniature model to predict. By inputting the parameter matrix of workload, resource consumption in physical machine and performance goal, the model can predict the resource requirement of application in virtualization environment subject to performance goal. In this paper, we choose streaming service as our research application. We try to discover the relationship of number of sessions, bit rate of video and resource consumption. Through the experiment we find out a simple relationship between them.