EXPEDITING HOST MAINTENANCE MODE IN CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS

摘要

A maintenance mode mechanism (MMM) expedites host maintenance in a cloud computing environment by intelligently suspending essentially inactive virtual machines. The user is given the option to enter maintenance mode using the MMM. The MMM determines essentially inactive VMs that can be suspended to reduce the number of VMs that need to be migrated prior to entering a maintenance mode. Metrics of the VMs associated with the host are analyzed to determine which VMs can be suspended. Parameters can also be set by the user to instruct the MMM to verify the selection of a specific VM with the user.