DRIVE-Dispatching Requests Indirectly through Virtual Environment

Abstract

Dispatching a large number of dynamically changing requests directly to a small number of servers exposes the disparity between the requests and the machines. In this paper, we present a novel approach that dispatches requests to servers through virtual machines, called Dispatching Requests Indirectly through Virtual Environment (DRIVE). Client requests are first dispatched to virtual machines that are subsequently dispatched to actual physical machines. This buffering of requests helps to reduce the complexity involved in dispatching a large number of requests to a small number of machines. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the DRIVE framework, we set up an experimental environment consisting of a PC cluster and four benchmark suites. With the experimental results, we demonstrate that the use of virtual machines indeed abstracts away the client requests and hence helps to improve the overall performance of a dynamically changing computing environment. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.