Themis: Energy Efficient Management of Workloads in Virtualized Data Centers

Virtualized data centers facilitate higher resource utilization and energy efficiency through consolidation. However, mixing services-oriented workloads with throughput (batch) jobs is typically avoided due to complex interactions and widely different quality of service (QoS) requirements. We introduce a complete VM resource management framework, called Themis, which manages combined services and batch jobs, maximizing energy-efficient throughput of the latter without sacrificing the service guarantees of the former. Themis' resource management policy outperforms the prior proposed policies by up to 35% on average in work done per Joule when measured on a data center testbed.