1. What are the challenges in hotspot mitigation?

- Detecting and mitigating hotspots through virtual machine migration.

2. Why is determining a new mapping of VMs to physical servers difficult?

- It is NP-hard, analogous to the multidimensional bin packing problem.

3. What does the hotspot mitigation algorithm do?

- Determines which virtual servers to migrate and where to dissipate hotspots.

4. What is the focus of dynamic replication in dynamic provisioning approaches?

- Varying the number of servers allocated to an application.

5. What type of migration is performed in virtualization for dynamic provisioning?

- VM migration, which is transparent to applications executing within virtual machines.

6. What does the Sandipiper architecture consist of?

- Nucleus, Monitor resources, Report to control plane, One per server.

7. What is the main function of the Profiling Engine in hotspot mitigation?

- Decide how much resource allocation is needed.

8. What are the differences between black-box and gray-box monitoring?

- Black-box only uses data from outside the VM, while Gray-box accesses OS stats and
application logs.

9. How does Xen perform black-box monitoring for CPU?

- By incrementing the Xen hypervisor to provide domain-0 with access to CPU scheduling
events.

10. What are the benefits of virtualization discussed?

- Decreased cost, improved manageability, migration, and enhanced security.

11. What is the purpose of consolidation in virtualization?

- To run multiple virtual machines on a single physical platform.

12. What is a Bare-metal hypervisor?

- A type 1 hypervisor that directly controls hardware resources.

13. How does Bare-metal virtualization function?

- The hypervisor manages hardware resources and supports VM execution.

14. What are the different privilege levels in x86 hardware?

- Rings 0 to 3 with Ring 0 having the highest privilege.

15. Which virtualization model includes a full-fledged host OS?

- The Hosted Hypervisor (Type 2) model.

16. Name two popular virtualization models discussed in the notes.

- Bare-metal hypervisor (Type 1) and Hosted Hypervisor (Type 2).

17. What are some benefits of using virtualization?

- Debugging, affordable support for legacy OSs, and security.

18. What is the purpose of the Host OS in hosted virtualization model?

- To manage hardware resources and integrate a VMM module.

19. Which virtualization solutions use the Bare-metal virtualization model?

- Xen (Open source or Citrix Xen Server) and VMware ESX.

20. What is the privileged domain called in Xen virtualization?

- Dom 0.

21. How does virtualization help in improving security?

- By encapsulating OS and applications in virtual machines.

22. How can the lower bound on request rate be determined for the virtual EL
server?

- By substituting service time, variance of inter-arrival and service times into an equation.

23. What does ;¶6&W&W6VçB–âF†R6öçFPxt of the VM's capacity?

- Current capacity of the VM to service requests.

24. How should the CPU share of a VM be adjusted to service peak workload?

- Scale up the allocated share by the factor ;·V²ò»cap.

25. How is the peak network bandwidth usage estimated?

- By multiplying the estimated peak arrival rate and mean requested file size.

26. What are the stages involved in live VM migration as per the notes?
- Pre-Migration, Reservation, Iterative Pre-Copy, Stop-and-Copy, Commitment, Activation.

27. What occurs during the Reservation stage of live VM migration?

- Confirmation of necessary resources on target host; VM container reservation.

28. Describe the Iterative Pre-Copy stage in live VM migration.

- Transfer of all pages from source to destination in first iteration.

29. What is the objective of the Stop-and-Copy stage in live VM migration?

- To suspend the running OS instance, transfer CPU state and memory pages.

30. Explain the Commitment stage in live VM migration.

- Host B acknowledges successful reception of OS image; host A commits migration transaction.

31. What takes place during the Activation stage of live VM migration?

- The migrated VM on destination host is activated.

32. How does the hotspot mitigation algorithm determine VMs to migrate?

- Resorts to a heuristic to minimize migration overhead.

33. Why is reducing migration overhead important in hotspot mitigation?

- To minimize the amount of data transferred during live migrations.

34. What architecture is discussed in x86 privilege level without virtualization?

- x86 privilege level architecture

35. What is the key concept in Processor Virtualization?

- Trap-and-Emulate
36. What problem arose with Trap-and-Emulate in x86 Pre 2005 systems?

- 17 privileged instructions not trapping

37. Who commercialized Binary Translation as Vmware?

- Mendel Rosenblum's group at Stanford

38. What is the main idea behind Binary Translation in virtualization?

- Rewrite VM binary to avoid problematic instructions

39. What is the goal of Para virtualization?

- Performance improvement

40. What is a Hypercall in Para virtualization?

- Similar to system calls, explicit calls to the hypervisor

41. How much Guest OS code may need modification in Para virtualization?

- Less than 2%

42. What does Memory Virtualization involve to support guest OS?

- Virtualizing the MMU (Memory Management Unit)

43. What is the purpose of Shadow Page Tables in Memory Virtualization?

- Accelerate memory mappings

44. How does Memory Virtualization work in Full virtualization?

- Maps virtual to physical addresses

45. What is the difference in handling memory in Para virtualization compared to

Full virtualization?
- Guest explicitly registers page tables with the hypervisor

46. What technologies were used by Yahoo! and Facebook for big data
processing?

- Hadoop and Pig for Yahoo!; Hadoop and Hive for Facebook

47. What is the difference between public and private clouds?

- Public clouds provide service to any paying customer; private clouds are accessible only to
company employees.

48. Name examples of popular vendors for creating private clouds.

- VMware, Microsoft Azure, Eucalyptus, etc.

49. Should a new service/company use a public cloud or purchase a private

cloud?

- Depends on factors like cost, accessibility, and control.

50. What factors are considered in deciding to outsource or own a cloud service?

- Monthly costs, including storage, CPUs, and overall expenses.

51. What are the key characteristics of cloud computing?

- Scale, on-demand access, data-intensive, new programming problems.

52. What is the definition of virtualization?

- Efficient, isolated duplicate of a real machine, allowing multiple OSs to run concurrently on the
same physical machine.

53. Who developed the concept of virtualization and when?

- Virtualization originated in the 1960s at IBM.

54. What are some goals of a virtual machine monitor (VMM)?

- Fidelity, safety, isolation, and performance control.

55. What is the purpose of a virtual machine monitor (VMM)?

- To provide an environment essentially identical to the original machine.

56. How does Xen track events to determine the duration of each virtual machine
within a measurement interval?

- Xen tracks events to determine the duration of each virtual machine within each measurement
interval.

57. What does Domain-0 in Xen do regarding network monitoring?

- Domain-0 in Xen implements the network interface driver for network monitoring.

58. How does Xen enable multiplexing of virtual interfaces onto the physical
network interface?

- Xen enables multiplexing by attaching virtual interfaces to the virtual firewall-router (VFR).

59. What challenges are associated with black-box monitoring of memory in Xen?

- Challenges include Xen allocating memory to VM and the need for OS management within
each VM.

60. How does Xen determine which memory pages are dirtied during migration?

- Xen uses shadow page tables for migration to determine which pages are dirtied.

61. In what scenarios is black-box monitoring useful?

- Black-box monitoring is useful when it is not feasible to gather usage statistics inside a VM.

62. What environment allows OS-level statistics and application logs gathering?

- Corporate data centers allow gathering of OS-level statistics and application logs.
63. What is gray-box monitoring in the context of virtual server monitoring?

- Gray-box monitoring involves installing a monitoring daemon within each virtual server.

64. What interface does the monitoring daemon in Linux use to gather OS-level
statistics?

- The monitoring daemon in Linux uses the /proc interface to gather OS-level statistics.

65. How does gray-box monitoring enable explicit detection of SLA violations?

- Gray-box monitoring directly monitors application-level statistics for SLA violation detection.

66. What does a hotspot indicate in the context of virtual server resources?

- A hotspot indicates a resource deficit on the physical server to serve VM workloads.

67. What estimates are needed before resolving a hotspot through migrations?

- Estimates of additional resources needed by overloaded VMs to fulfill SLAs.

68. How does hotspot detection differ in black-box and gray-box approaches?

- Black-box approach flags hotspots based on aggregate CPU or network, while gray-box
detects explicitly.

69. What are the three key models for device virtualization?

- Passthrough Model, Hypervisor Direct Model, Split Device Driver Model

70. In the Passthrough Model, how does the VMM handle device access
permissions?

- VMM-level driver configures device access permissions.

71. What is the downside of the Hypervisor-Direct Model approach?

- Latency of device operations and device driver ecosystem complexities in the hypervisor.
72. How does the Split-Device Driver Model split device access control?

- Between front-end driver in guest VM and back-end driver in service VM or host.

73. What does the lecture define and discuss regarding virtualization
approaches?

- Defined virtualization and discussed main virtualization approaches.

74. What do hot spot mitigation techniques aim to automate?

- Monitoring and detecting hotspots by determining new mappings and initiating migrations.

75. What are the two approaches discussed for hotspot mitigation in VM
migration?

- Black-box approach and Gray-box approach exploiting OS and application statistics.

76. What are data centers composed of in enterprise environments?

- Large clusters of servers and network attached storage devices.

77. What is a benefit of virtualization in data centers for running multiple

applications?

- Provides isolation, security, and allows for rapid resource adjustments.

78. What are the causes of dynamic workload fluctuations in data center
workloads?

- Incremental growth, time-of-day effects, flash crowds, etc.

79. What is the key feature of on-demand access in cloud computing?

- Pay-as-you-go, no upfront commitment.

80. How has the nature of data changed from MBs to PBs in cloud computing?
- From MBs to TBs, PBs, and XBs.

81. Name some of the cloud programming paradigms mentioned in the notes.

- MapReduce/Hadoop, NoSQL/Cassandra/MongoDB.

82. What is the concept of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in cloud computing?

- Get access to flexible computing and storage infrastructure.

83. In data-intensive computing, what resource metric becomes more important

than CPU utilization?

- I/O (disk and/or network).

84. What are some examples of data-intensive computing areas?

- MPI-based, High-performance computing, Grids.

85. Which cloud service classification offers access to software services when
needed?

- Software as a Service (SaaS).

86. What is the purpose of Platform as a Service (PaaS) in cloud computing?

- Get access to computing and storage infrastructure coupled with a software platform.

87. What measuring metric indicates good power efficiency in a data center?

- PUE = Total facility Power / IT Equipment Power.

88. Describe how cooling is managed in a cloud computing environment.

- Cool air moved through the system by using purified water and air intake.

89. When is a hotspot flagged in the gray-box approach?

- When memory utilization of a VM exceeds a threshold or SLA values are exceeded.

90. How are transient spikes filtered out in hotspot detection?

- By flagging a hotspot only if thresholds are exceeded for a sustained time.

91. How do values of k and n affect hotspot detection aggressiveness?

- Small k values are aggressive, while large k values are conservative.

92. What is the extreme approach for hotspot detection with n=k=1?

- Flags hotspot as soon as a threshold is exceeded.

93. How does the threshold setting affect hotspot detection?

- Lower thresholds imply aggressive migrations; higher thresholds imply higher utilizations.

94. Why is the next predicted value considered in hotspot detection?

- To ensure that the hotspot is likely to persist based on observed trends.

95. What time-series prediction techniques are used in hotspot detection?

- Auto-regressive family of predictors is employed.

96. What is the role of the AR(1) predictor in time-series prediction?

- It predicts future values using prior observations and time series statistics.

97. How are new hotspots detected in the system?

- The hotspot detector updates predictions and checks for threshold exceedance.

98. When must a provisioned resource trigger in black-box provisioning?

- When the resource needs exceed the estimated peak CPU, network, and memory
requirements.
99. What is used to estimate peak CPU and network bandwidth needs?

- Distribution profiles are used for estimation purposes.

100. Who gave the slogan 'The network is the computer' in 1984?

- John Gage of Sun Microsystems

101. In 2008, who stated 'The data center is the computer'?

- David Patterson of UC Berkeley

102. According to Rajkumar Buyya, what is 'the computer' in recent times?

- The cloud

103. What are clouds anticipated to process according to the notes?

- Huge data sets generated by Internet, social networks, and IoT

104. What does a single-site cloud consist of?

- Compute nodes, switches, storage nodes, and front-end for job submissions

105. How is distributed computing defined in the notes?

- Multiple autonomous computers communicating through message passing

106. What do clouds consist of according to the notes?

- Physical or virtualized resources over distributed data centers

107. According to Moore's law, what doubles every 18 months?

- Processor speed

108. What law indicates that network bandwidth has doubled each year?
- Gilder's law

109. What was the bandwidth mostly in 1985 according to the notes?

- Mostly 56Kbps links nationwide

110. What was the disk capacity comparison between today's PCs and a 1990
supercomputer?

- Today's PCs have TBs, far more than a 1990 supercomputer

111. According to the notes, what is utility computing intended to support?

- Dynamic discovery and autonomic operations

112. How did MIT's Fernando Corbató envision computer facility operation in
1965?

- Operating like a power company or water company

113. What business model does utility computing focus on according to the
notes?

- Customers receive computing resources from a paid service provider

114. What major computing paradigms are composable with QoS and SLAs?

- Utility and cloud computing

115. What method is used to estimate future peak needs based on recent past
usage?

- Computing a high percentile (e.g., the 95th percentile) of the CPU and network bandwidth
distribution.

116. How are peak resource needs estimated in the black-box provisioning
approach?

- Peak needs are estimated by observing the tail of the CPU and network bandwidth usage
distribution.

117. In the black-box approach, how is peak memory need estimation different
from CPU and network needs?

- Memory provisioning is based on observed swap activity rather than high percentiles of usage
distribution.

118. What approach uses application-level logs to estimate peak resource

needs?

- The gray-box provisioning approach.

119. How is the peak arrival rate estimated in the gray-box provisioning
approach?

- By summing the serviced and dropped request rates and identifying a high percentile in the
distribution.

120. Which type of applications can be modeled as G/G/1 queuing systems for
estimating peak CPU needs?

- Applications such as web and database servers.

121. What queuing theory result is used to estimate peak CPU needs in G/G/1
queuing systems?

- Utilizing a queuing theory result with mean response time, mean service time, and request
arrival rate.

122. What is the impact of VM migration on application performance inside the

VM?

- The performance impact is significant due to Xen intercepting all memory accesses for the
migrating domain.

123. How can the total migration time and performance impact on applications
be minimized during VM migration?

- By reducing the amount of data copied over the network.

124. How can placement for VM migration be determined according to the
course notes?

- Use Volume to find the most loaded servers and target highly loaded servers first based on
multiple resource dimensions.

125. What is an approach discussed in the lecture to rapidly detect and eliminate
hotspots during VM migration?

- Treating each VM as a black-box and implementing an approach for hotspot mitigation.

126. How can virtual machine migration be leveraged in dynamic data center
provisioning based on the conclusion from the course notes?

- As a viable tool for dynamic data center provisioning by rapidly detecting and eliminating
hotspots.

127. According to the course notes, how can gray-box information improve
performance in some scenarios?

- By using information from gray-box monitoring to enhance performance in proactive memory

allocations.

128. What will be discussed in the lecture?

- Brief introduction to Cloud Computing and aspects of Why Clouds, What is a Cloud.

129. How have evolutionary changes impacted distributed and cloud computing?

- Changes in machine architecture, operating system platform, network connectivity, and

application workload.

130. What does a distributed computing system use to solve large-scale

problems?

- Multiple computers over the Internet.

131. According to Gartner in 2009, what was the forecast for cloud computing
revenue by 2013?
- Expected to exceed $150 billion.

132. Name some popular cloud providers.

- AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine/AppEngine, Rightscale, Salesforce, and more.

133. What are the two categories of clouds?

- Public cloud and private cloud.

134. How can companies save time and money using AWS according to the text?

- New server deployment in 3 minutes, 64-node Linux cluster online in 5 minutes.

135. What is the significance of advances in virtualization for Internet clouds?

- It allows new computing paradigm with differences in software distribution.