POF-SVLM: pareto optimized framework for seamless VM live migration

Abstract

Live migration helps to achieve resource consolidation and fault tolerance. It transfers VM storage together with VM memory and CPU status. During migration, a dirty page rate also delays the period of live migration, and it affects the performance of migration by increasing migration time, network bandwidth consumption, CPU processing overheads and application downtime. Experimental results after comparing with existing methods of VM live migration, reflects that with high data transfer rate, prolonged migration time and downtime make it infeasible to achieve seamless live migration. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the KVM strategy for live migration. It shows that the KVM iterative copy method, where all RAM data is marked as dirty and transferred during the first iteration, initially generating majority of additional overheads, mainly due to large data transfer. Based on these findings, the innovative Pareto Optimized framework [POF-SVLM] was developed and deployed as a standardized VM storage network, such as the Network Attached Storage (NAS), shared between the source and the target machine. Only the VM primary storage is to be transferred during live migration. Additionally, the architecture effectively monitors all I/O VM requests to determine unique pages in the primary memory that are only transferred during the iterations. All duplicate pages are downloaded directly from the NAS to the target machine. Detailed experimental evaluation shows that the proposed mechanism reduces the VM live migration overheads by 55–60%. Experimental results also shows that the downtime of POF-SVLM based live migration is in the range less than 60 s even for highly intense workloads. This is the most significant contribution of POF-SVLM because since the downtime less than 60 s, the user will not be able to notice it and results in seamless VM live migration.