HOPE: Enabling efficient service orchestration in software-defined data centers

The functional scope of today's software-defined data centers (SDDC) has expanded to such an extent that servers face a growing amount of critical background operational tasks like load monitoring, logging, migration, and duplication, etc. These ancillary operations, which we refer to as management operations, often nibble the stringent data center power envelope and exert a tremendous amount of pressure on front-end user tasks. However, existing power capping, peak shaving, and time shifting mechanisms mainly focus on managing data center power demand at the "macro level" - they do not distinguish ancillary background services from user tasks, and therefore often incur significant performance degradation and energy overhead. In this study we explore "micro-level" power management in SDDC: tuning a specific set of critical loads for the sake of overall system efficiency and performance. Specifically, we look at management operations that can often lead to resource contention and energy overhead in an IaaS SDDC. We assess the feasibility of this new power management paradigm by characterizing the resource and power impact of various management operations. We propose HOPE, a new system optimization framework for eliminating the potential efficiency bottleneck caused by the management operations in the SDDC. HOPE is implemented on a customized OpenStack cloud environment with heavily instrumented power infrastructure. We thoroughly validate HOPE models and optimization efficacy under various user workload scenarios. Our deployment experiences show that the proposed technique allows SDDC to reduce energy consumption by 19%, reduce management operation execution time by 25.4%, and in the meantime improve workload performance by 30%.