Fast Live Migration for IO-Intensive VMs with Parallel and Adaptive Transfer of Page Cache via SAN

Abstract

SUMMARYLive migration plays an important role on improving efficiency of cloud data centers by enabling dynamically replacing virtual machines (VMs) without disrupting services running on them. Although many studies have proposed acceleration mechanisms of live migration, IO-intensive VMs still suffer from long total migration time due to a large amount of page cache. Existing studies for this problem either force the guest OS to delete the page cache before a migration, or they do not consider dynamic characteristics of cloud data centers. We propose a parallel and adaptive transfer of page cache for migrating IO-intensive VMs which (1) does not delete the page cache and is still fast by utilizing the storage area network of a data center, and (2) achieves the shortest total migration time without tuning hand-crafted parameters. Experiments showed that our method reduces total migration time of IO-intensive VMs up to 33.9%.