Cost of Virtual Machine Live Migration in Clouds: A Performance Evaluation

摘要

Virtualization has become commonplace in modern data centers, often referredas "computing clouds". The capability of virtual machine live migration bringsbenefits such as improved performance, manageability and fault tolerance, whileallowing workload movement with a short service downtime. However, servicelevels of applications are likely to be negatively affected during a livemigration. For this reason, a better understanding of its effects on systemperformance is desirable. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of livemigration of virtual machines on the performance of applications running insideXen VMs. Results show that, in most cases, migration overhead is acceptable butcannot be disregarded, especially in systems where availability andresponsiveness are governed by strict Service Level Agreements. Despite that,there is a high potential for live migration applicability in data centersserving modernInternet applications. Our results are based on a workloadcovering the domain of multi-tier Web 2.0 applications.