Self Aware Virtualization

The resource benefits and cost savings of virtualization are well known. But there is one more step that needs to be taken before this transformation technology can really be dubbed evolutionary - Self Awareness.

Currently, for Organisations to provision and reallocate pooled resources they need detailed knowledge of application behaviour and runtime requirements.

Self Awareness will allow virtualization operating systems and virtualised infrastructure solutions to automatically detect the applications need and allocate resources to fit, instead of requiring a lot of observation and scripting.

Automating the distribution of computing, storage and communications resources requires that software within a virtual container take an active role independent of its awareness that it is running in a virtual setting.

Currently software queries its environment to set a start-up and continuous operating state and responds to any changes in the environment. The realities of isolating its senses to the 'virtual' environment remain a challenge.

Hence, software must be able to query subordinate software to ascertain its needs. Whilst technology current exists now to do this at start-up, the runtime behaviour remains a challenge.

One possible solution is auto-parallelisation - where linear execution paths are split apart and run as parallel threads. Just as the ideal virtual infrastructure is a grid, the ideal unit of mobile workload is the thread.

Two technologies that apply runtime analysis to the goal of optimisation involves compiling the application with capability for detailed runtime profiling, producing a detailed log of the application's behaviour. This log, plus the source and object code, is then be pushed through the compiler a second time, with the resulting analysis creating the potential for optimisation bounded by only the intelligence in the compiler.

If this intelligence is not made available at runtime, then a virtualisation engine would not need to contend with whether a process, thread, block of memory, open file handle or network socket could be safely relocated. Thus, complicated planning and automated reallocation of resources would be significantly reduced.

Referenced from article by Tom Yager US "Self-aware virtualisation would be a blessing"

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