Developing power‐aware scheduling mechanisms for computing systems virtualized by Xen

Summary Cloud computing emerges as one of the most important technologies for interconnecting people and building the so-called Internet of People (IoP). In such a cloud-based IoP, the virtualization technique provides the key supporting environments for running the IoP jobs such as performing data analysis and mining personal information. Nowadays, energy consumption in such a system is a critical metric to measure the sustainability and eco-friendliness of the system. This paper develops three power-aware scheduling strategies in virtualized systems managed by Xen, which is a popular virtualization technique. These three strategies are the Least performance Loss Scheduling strategy, the No performance Loss Scheduling strategy, and the Best Frequency Match scheduling strategy. These power-aware strategies are developed by identifying the limitation of Xen in scaling the CPU frequency and aim to reduce the energy waste without sacrificing the jobs running performance in the computing systems virtualized by Xen. Least performance Loss Scheduling works by re-arranging the execution order of the virtual machines (VMs). No performance Loss Scheduling works by setting a proper initial CPU frequency for running the VMs. Best Frequency Match reduces energy waste and performance loss by allowing the VMs to jump the queue so that the VM that is put into execution best matches the current CPU frequency. Scheduling for both single core and multicore processors is considered in this paper. The evaluation experiments have been conducted, and the results show that compared with the original scheduling strategy in Xen, the developed power-aware scheduling algorithm is able to reduce energy consumption without reducing the performance for the jobs running in Xen. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.