Virtual Machines in the Data Center
Explore the role of virtual machines in data centers and how they influence distributed system performance. Learn about resource oversubscription, application design challenges, and clock synchronization problems to build resilient, efficient software.
We'll cover the following...
Virtualization
Virtualization promised developers a common hardware appearance across the bewildering array of physical configurations in the data center. It promised data center managers that it would rein in “server sprawl” and pack all those extra web servers running at 5 percent utilization into a high-density, high-utilization, easily managed whole. Guess which story turned out to be more compelling?
On the down side, performance is much less predictable. Many virtual machines can reside on the same physical hosts. It’s rare to see VMs move from one host to another, because it’s disruptive to the guest. (The “host operating ...