NOTE: Lunch will be served at noon; the talk will start some time thereafter (perhaps 12:20 or so).

Abstract: Automated management of physical resources is critical for reducing the operational costs of virtualized environments. An effective resource-management solution must provide performance isolation among virtual machines (VMs), handle resource fragmentation across physical hosts and optimize scheduling for multiple resources. It must also utilize the underlying hardware infrastructure efficiently. In this talk, I will present the design and implementation of one of our key management solution: DRS. I will also highlight some key lessons learned from production customer deployments over a period of more than five years. VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) manages the allocation of physical resources to a set of virtual machines deployed in a cluster of hosts, each running the VMware ESX hypervisor. DRS maps VMs to hosts and performs intelligent load balancing in order to improve performance and to enforce both user-specified policies and system-level constraints. DRS also supports a “what-if” mode, making it possible to evaluate the impact of changes in workloads or cluster configuration.

Bio: Ajay Gulati is an R & D staff member in the distributed resource management team at VMware. At VMware, his work has lead to some of the new storage management features such as Storage I/O control and Storage DRS, released as part of vSphere 4.1 and 5.0 releases respectively. Along with developing products at VMware, he has published his research at many conferences such as SOCC, OSDI, Sigmetrics, Usenix ATC, Usenix FAST and SPAA. He has also given several talks on various storage-related topics at VMworld, which is an industry conference on virtualization.