Optimised pre-copy live VM migration approach for evaluating mathematical expression by dependency identification

Abstract

Live virtual machine (VM) migration is widely used technique for resource consolidation and fault tolerance. KVM and Xen use iterative pre-copy approaches which work well in practice for commercial applications. In this paper, we propose a novel idea for pre-copy live VM migration process and present a detailed performance analysis of the migration process. We show that the migration downtime can be reduced significantly when compared with the previously proposed algorithms. The main idea is to identify the independent instructions from the set of instructions that are still executing at source server. These independent instructions are transmitted to the destination server and start executing without waiting for source server to transmit all the instructions. We present a novel algorithm able to attain minimal downtime and minimal total execution time.