2023

Zaidenberg, Nezer Jacob; Kiperberg, Michael; Elinav, Yael; Moshinky, Alex; Siag, Lior

Virtual servers are now standard in data centres. Multiple virtual machines (guests) are consolidated on much fewer hosts on-site or on “the cloud”, Thus saving most of the hosting costs. Virtual servers serve most of our computational needs. However, virtual machines consume no physical space. Thus abandoned servers are often unnoticed. The system administrators do not delete the servers. Sometimes the administrators do not know the servers are not in use. (Some servers often “become” unused as business processes changes, and the System administrators are not informed when the last user no longer uses the server) These servers are known as “zombie” machines. “Zombie” machines waste resources and (as they are left unattended and unpatched) pose a cyber security risk. We present HERO (Host Environment Resource Optimization). HERO is a novel tool to optimize resource use and security. HERO uses multiple tests and machine learning approaches to assist system administrators in identifying and removing “zombie” machines.