Performance and energy modeling for live migration of virtual machines

  • Authors:

  • Haikun Liu;Cheng-Zhong Xu;Hai Jin;Jiayu Gong;Xiaofei Liao

  • Affiliations:

  • Huazhong University of Science and Technology & Wayne State University, Wuhan, China;Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA;Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China;Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA;Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 20th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Live migration of virtual machine (VM) provides a significant benefit for virtual server mobility without disrupting service. It is widely used for system management in virtualized data centers. However, migration costs may vary significantly for different workloads due to the variety of VM configurations and workload characteristics. To take into account the migration overhead in migration decision-making, we investigate design methodologies to quantitatively predict the migration performance and energy cost. We thoroughly analyze the key parameters that affect the migration cost from theory to practice. We construct two application-oblivious models for the cost prediction by using learned knowledge about the workloads at the hypervisor (also called VMM) level. This should be the first kind of work to estimate VM live migration cost in terms of both performance and energy in a quantitative approach. We evaluate the models using five representative workloads on a Xen virtualized environment. Experimental results show that the refined model yields higher than 90% prediction accuracy in comparison with measured cost. Model-guided decisions can significantly reduce the migration cost by more than 72.9% at an energy saving of 73.6%.