An Approach to Improve the Live Migration Using Asynchronized Cache and Prioritized IP Packets

Abstract

The live migration of a virtual machine is a method of moving virtual machines across hosts within a virtualized data center. Two main parameters should be considered for evaluation of live migration; total duration, and downtime of migration. This paper focuses on optimization of live migration in Xen environment where memory pages are dirtied rapidly. An approach is proposed to manage dirty pages during migration in the cache and prioritize the packets at the network level. According to the evaluations, when the system is under heavy workload or it is running within a stress tool, the virtual machines are intensively writing. The proposed approach outperforms the default method in terms of number of transferred pages, total migration time, and downtime. Experimental results showed that by increasing workload, the proposed approach reduced the number of sent pages by 47.4%, total migration time by 10%, and the downtime by 27.7% in live migration.