- Service Level Definitions and Interactions
- Resource Management Control Loop
- Viewpoints of Resource Management
- Integrated Methods
- The Consolidation Process
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Resource Management Control Loop
To manage a resource, you must be able to measure and control it. A control loop is set up that measures the performance of an application subsystem, applies policies and goals to decide what to do, then uses controls to change the resources being provided to that subsystem. This loop can be implemented manually on a time scale measured in days or weeks (by reconfiguring and upgrading entire systems), or it can be automated in software and run as often as every few seconds. The control loop is shown in FIGURE 2-2.
){kind=link}
FIGURE 2-2 Resource Management Control Loop
A complete system implements many control loops. A brief digression into basic control theory is provided at this point to help explain the behavior of such systems.
A Simple Approach to Control Theory
We spend so much of our lives operating control loops that it is actually quite intuitive to most people. Designing a control loop is more complex and requires a more explicit understanding of the situation.
You start with an objective, such as to steer a car around a corner while staying in the lane. You apply a control input by turning the steering wheel to the point that will get you around the corner. After a delay. the car responds, You measure the response, compare it with what you wanted, and obtain the error difference. If the difference is zero you don't need to change the control input. If the turn is too tight, you need to reduce the input. If the turn is too wide, you need to increase the input. You have to decide how much extra correction is needed to compensate for being wrong the first time, and also decide whether the car has finished responding fully to the initial input. You may decide to over- or under-correct, and apply the correction gradually or quickly (for example, if you are heading straight for a lamp post!).
FIGURE 2-3 Example Control Loop
){kind=link}
The first time you tried a car driving game on a computer, you probably swung wildly from side to side. This wild swinging is caused by over-correcting too late because you don't have the same motion sensing inputs you have in a real car. When the car is oscillating, your corrections may end up being delayed to the point that you are turning the wheel the wrong way at the wrong time, and you might spin off or crash. Eventually, you learn to react based on what you see on the screen and make smaller corrections more quickly to keep the car on track and stable.
In control terms, you are applying negative feedback to the system. You take the error difference between what you wanted and what you got, and apply the inverse of the error to the system to reduce the error in the future. The rate at which you measure and apply corrections is called the control interval, and the rate at which the system responds to changes is called the time constant for the loop. The amount of the error that you feed back changes the characteristic behavior of the control loop. If you feed back a large proportion of the error with a short control interval, the system is lightly damped and will be very responsive to sudden changes but will probably oscillate back and forth. If you feed back a small proportion of the error over a longer control interval, the system is heavily damped and will tend to be sluggish and unresponsive with a large time constant.
When you apply these principles to computer system resource management you can see that it is important to average measurements over an appropriate time scale and get the damping factor right. The resource manager needs to respond quickly enough to cope with sudden changes in the workload such as many simultaneous user logins at the start of a shift, while maintaining a steady flow of resources to all the workloads on the system so that response times are consistent and predictable.