Workload modeling for virtual machine-hosted application

The workload complexity of virtual machine-hosted (VM-hosted) applications widens the gap between resource demand and allocation, which could lead to either resource underutilization or application overload. This study addresses this issue by providing a correlation analysis approach and a novel workload model for VM-hosted applications. Based on the grey system theory, the correlation analysis approach is used to determine the bottleneck resource of a given VM-hosted application, and the Workload Conversion Model (WCM) constructs a quantitative relationship between the application workload and the consumption of the bottleneck resource by modeling the resource consumption. We apply our model to a video-on-demand system as a case study. The model identifies that the VM memory is a key bottleneck resource of the system, and a bimodal relationship exists between the workload and VM memory consumption. The experimental results also show that the precision of the WCM is high, with a relative percentage error less than 5% and a variance ratio less than 25%.