High performance virtual machine migration with RDMA over modern interconnects

— One of the most useful features provided by virtual machine (VM) technologies is the ability to migrate running OS instances across distinct physical nodes. As a basis for many administration tools in modern clusters and data-centers, VM migration is desired to be extremely efficient to reduce both migration time and performance impact on hosted applications. Currently, most VM environments use the Socket interface and the TCP/IP protocol to transfer VM migration traffic. In this paper, we propose a high performance VM migration design by using RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). RDMA is a feature provided by many modern high speed interconnects that are currently being widely deployed in data-centers and clusters. By taking advantage of the low software overhead and the one-sided nature of RDMA, our design significantly improves the efficiency of VM migration. We also contribute a set of micro-benchmarks and application-level benchmark evaluations aimed at evaluating important...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Wei Huang, Qi Gao, Jiuxing Liu, Dhabaleswar K. Panda
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2007, Cluster Computing, Migration Time, VM Migration, VM Migration Traffic