J Supercomput DOI 10.1007/s11227-013-0939-2 Virtual machine consolidation based on interference modeling Shin-gyu Kim · Hyeonsang Eom · Heon Y. Yeom © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract Server consolidation is very attractive for cloud computing platforms to improve energy efficiency and resource utilization. Advances in multi-core proces- sors and virtualization technologies have enabled many workloads to be consolidated in a physical server. However, current virtualization technologies do not ensure per- formance isolation among guest virtual machines, which results in degraded perfor- mance due to contention in shared resources along with violation of service level agreement (SLA) of the cloud service. In that sense, minimizing performance in- terference among co-located virtual machines is the key factor of successful server consolidation policy in the cloud computing platforms. In this work, we propose a performance model that considers interferences in the shared last-level cache and memory bus. Our performance interference model can estimate how much an appli- cation will hurt others and how much an application will suffer from others. We also present a virtual machine consolidation method called swim which is based on our interference model. Experimental results show that the average performance degra- dation ratio by swim is comparable to the optimal allocation. Keywords Virtual machine · Server consolidation · Resource contention · Performance interference model S. Kim · H. Eom · H.Y. Yeom ( ) School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea e-mail: yeom@snu.ac.kr S. Kim e-mail: sgkim@dcslab.snu.ac.kr H. Eom e-mail: hseom@cse.snu.ac.kr