Enhancing Performance of Data Centers Using Location-Aware Live VM Migration

Abstract

Virtualization in cloud data centers ensures many benefits to cloud providers and customers, such as availability, efficiency, transparency, reduced costs, reliability, easier backups. An inefficient virtualization, however, can not only degrade the performance of a cloud data center but can also prove to be energy inefficient. To bring virtualization to our benefit, an efficient virtual machine migration is required where a demanding virtual machine is transferred from an overloaded host machine to another for the purpose of load balancing. This paper combines the benefits of existing virtual machine migration techniques in non-clustered data centers and presents a new improved live migration technique that takes place in clustered data centers, thereby taking full advantage of virtual machines’ identities in clusters. Simulation experiments also show that our proposed migration technique is energy efficient by 28% as compared to migration in non-clustered environment, while maintaining low round-trip time, low latency and high throughput.