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

Abstract. Virtualization technology has become commonplace in modern data centers and cluster systems, often referred as “computing clouds”. In particular, the capability of virtual machine (VM) migration brings multiple benefits such as higher performance, improved manageability and fault tolerance. Moreover, live migration of VMs often allows workload movement with a short service downtime. However, service levels of running applications are likely to be negatively affected during a live VM migration. For this reason, a better understanding of its effects on system performance is highly desirable. In this paper, we present a performance evaluation on 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 service availability and responsiveness are governed by strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Despi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CLOUDCOM
• Authors: William Voorsluys, James Broberg, Srikumar Venugopal, Rajkumar Buyya
• Keywords: CLOUDCOM 2009, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Live Migration, Live Vm Migration, Virtual Machines