A Versioning Approach to VM Live Migration

Abstract

In the context of virtual machines live migration, two strategies called “pre-copy” and “post-copy” have already been presented; but each of these strategies works well only in some circumstances. In this paper, we have a brief presentation of QAVNS and then introduce a new approach which is based on the concept of object, assigning QAVNS-scheme-revision number, and observing the changes. In this approach, the total virtual machine memory is considered as a QAVNS informational object that is constantly changing. In this regard, we have defined some criteria and presented an algorithm by which the hypervisor can detect the current behavior of the virtual machine, and automatically select the virtual machine migration strategy from the two pre-copy and post-copy options. We evaluated the implementation & simulation platforms considering the state of the art available technologies, mostly CloudSim, SimGrid and DartCSim+. Formal analysis shows that applying the proposed scheme and the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the live migration process of virtual machines.