Multi-objective virtual machine migration in virtualized data center environments

Virtual machine (VM) live migration, the key problem of modern virtualized data centers, is a challenging task since 1) Frequent traffic across data center between coupling VMs limits the efficiency of current methods. 2) Most existing approaches suffered from poor scalability issues as multi-objective optimization is still an open question in these designs. To address these problems, in this paper, a novel multi-objective VM migration algorithm is proposed. Given the definition of dominant resource fairness, a max-min fair model subject to server-side constraints is introduced. Then, we further formulate the VM migration as an optimization problem which considers application dependencies to reduce network traffic caused by migration. By incorporating the two basic VM migration algorithms, we conduct a joint formulization for maximizing the utilization of physical machines while minimizing the traffic burden across dependent VMs. The simulation result demonstrates the accuracy of the theoretic model and it is shown that our proposed method decreases network traffic by up to 82.6%, significantly improving the efficiency of data centers.