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

Virtualization has become commonplace in modern data centers, often referred as "computing clouds". The capability of virtual machine live migration brings benefits such as improved performance, manageability and fault tolerance, while allowing workload movement with a short service downti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Voorsluys, William, Broberg, James, Venugopal, Srikumar, Buyya, Rajkumar
Format Paper Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 09.12.2011
Subjects
Cloud computing
Computer centers
Computer Science - Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Computer Science - Performance
Data centers
Downtime
Fault tolerance
Migration
Performance evaluation
Virtual environments
Web 2.0
Workload
Workloads
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Summary:Virtualization has become commonplace in modern data centers, often referred as "computing clouds". The capability of virtual machine live migration brings benefits such as improved performance, manageability and fault tolerance, while allowing workload movement with a short service downtime. However, service levels of applications are likely to be negatively affected during a live migration. For this reason, a better understanding of its effects on system performance is desirable. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of live migration of virtual machines on the performance of applications running inside Xen VMs. Results show that, in most cases, migration overhead is acceptable but cannot be disregarded, especially in systems where availability and responsiveness are governed by strict Service Level Agreements. Despite that, there is a high potential for live migration applicability in data centers serving modernInternet applications. Our results are based on a workload covering the domain of multi-tier Web 2.0 applications.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1109.4974