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

By William Voorsluys, J. Broberg, Srikumar Venugopal, Rajkumar Buyya. International Conference on Cloud Computing, 2009

642 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/533283b6d811d329f0793e09e37ec07037435b55

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Citations in the corpus

Resource Management in Clouds: Survey and Research Challenges (2015, background): “[225] study the effects of VM livemigration on the performance of applications in co-hostedVMs, finding that in some cases performance degradation can be appreciable.”
Performance and energy modeling for live migration of virtual machines (2011, neutral): “[36] evaluated the performance degradation of Web2.”
A survey on virtual machine migration and server consolidation frameworks for cloud data centers (2015, background): “To scale a CDC, virtualization exploits VM migration to relocate VMs both within and across CDCs to achieve various resource management objectives like server maintenance provisioning, power reduction, load balancing, and fault tolerance (Koomey, 2008; Voorsluys et al., 2009).”
From Cloud to Fog Computing: A Review and a Conceptual Live VM Migration Framework (2017, methodology): “A study to determine the effect of VM livemigration on the performance of the running application inside Xen VM was carried out in [92].”
Energy-aware resource allocation heuristics for efficient management of data centers for Cloud computing (2012, background): “Live migration creates an extra CPU load; however, it has been shown that the performance overhead is low [33].”
Optimal online deterministic algorithms and adaptive heuristics for energy and performance efficient dynamic consolidation of virtual machines in Cloud data centers (2012, background): “have performed an experimental study to investigate the value of this impact and find a way to model it [32].”
A survey on techniques for improving the energy efficiency of large-scale distributed systems (2014, background): “Moreover, it impacts the performance of VMs by adding a nonnegligible overhead [Voorsluys et al. 2009].”
Adaptive threshold-based approach for energy-efficient consolidation of virtual machines in cloud data centers (2010, background): “Voorsluys et al. have performed an experimental study to investigate the value of this impact and find a way to model it [14].”