Scalable Traffic-Aware Virtual Machine Management for Cloud Data Centers

Virtual Machine (VM) management is a powerful mechanism for providing elastic services over Cloud Data Centers (DC)s. At the same time, the resulting network congestion has been repeatedly reported as the main bottleneck in DCs, even when the overall resource utilization of the infrastructure remains low. However, most current VM management strategies are traffic-agnostic, while the few that are traffic-aware only concern a static initial allocation, ignore bandwidth oversubscription, or do not scale. In this paper we present S-CORE, a scalable VM migration algorithm to dynamically reallocate VMs to servers while minimizing the overall communication footprint of active traffic flows. We formulate the aggregate VM communication as an optimization problem and we then define a novel distributed migration scheme that iteratively adapts to dynamic traffic changes. Through extensive simulation and implementation results, we show that S-CORE achieves significant (up to 87%) communication cost reduction while incurring minimal overhead and downtime.