Adding a Live Migration Model into SimGrid: One More Step Toward the Simulation of Infrastructure-as-a-Service Concerns

Abstract

Although virtual machine (VM) placement problem has been an active research area over the past decade, the research community is still looking for an open simulation framework that can simulate in an accurate as well as scalable manner VM operations including live migrations. Existing frameworks, however, leverage a naive migration model that considers neither memory update operations nor resource sharing contention, resulting in an underestimate of both the duration of a live migration and the size of migration traffic. In this paper, we propose a simulation framework of virtualized distributed systems with the first class support of live migration operations. We developed a resource share calculation mechanism for VMs and a live migration model implementing the precopy migration algorithm of Qemu/KVM. We extended a widely used simulation toolkit, SimGrid, which allows users to simulate large-scale distributed systems by using user-friendly programming API. Through experiments, we confirmed that our simulation framework correctly reproduced live migration behaviors of the real world under various conditions. Through a first use case, we also confirmed that it is possible to conduct large-scale simulations of complex virtualized workloads upon hundred thousands of VMs upon thousands of physical machines (PMs).