Cost of Virtual Machine Live Migration in Clouds: A Performance Evaluation

  • Authors:

  • William Voorsluys;James Broberg;Srikumar Venugopal;Rajkumar Buyya

  • Affiliations:

  • Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Australia;Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Australia;School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Australia

  • Venue:
  • CloudCom '09 Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Cloud Computing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Virtualization has become commonplace in modern data centers, often referred as "computing clouds". The capability of virtual machine live migration brings benefits such as improved performance, manageability and fault tolerance, while allowing workload movement with a short service downtime. However, service levels of applications are likely to be negatively affected during a live migration. For this reason, a better understanding of its effects on system performance is desirable. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of live migration of virtual machines on the performance of applications running inside Xen VMs. Results show that, in most cases, migration overhead is acceptable but cannot be disregarded, especially in systems where availability and responsiveness are governed by strict Service Level Agreements. Despite that, there is a high potential for live migration applicability in data centers serving modern Internet applications. Our results are based on a workload covering the domain of multi-tier Web 2.0 applications.