PerficientCloudSim: a tool to simulate large-scale computation in heterogeneous clouds

The major reason for using a simulator, instead of a real test-bed, is to enable repeatable evaluation of large-scale cloud systems. CloudSim, the most widely used simulator, enables users to implement resource provisioning, and management policies. However, CloudSim does not provide support for: (i) interactive online services; (ii) platform heterogeneities; (iii) virtual machine migration modelling; and (iv) other essential models to abstract a real datacenter. This paper describes modifications needed in the classical CloudSim to support realistic experimentations that closely match experimental outcomes in a real system. We extend, and partially re-factor CloudSim to "PerficientCloudSim" in order to provide support for large-scale computation over heterogeneous resources. In the classical CloudSim, we add several classes for workload performance variations due to: (a) CPU heterogeneities; (b) resource contention; and (c) service migration. Through plausible assumptions, our empirical evaluation, using real workload traces from Google and Microsoft Azure clusters, demonstrates that "PerficientCloudSim" can reasonably simulate large-scale heterogeneous datacenters in respect of resource allocation and migration policies, resource contention, and platform heterogeneities. We discuss statistical methods to measure the accuracy of the simulated outcomes.