Xen Live Migration with Slowdown Scheduling Algorithm

With the increasing number of technology areas using Virtual Machine (VM) platforms, challenges exist in Virtual Machine migrating from one physical host to another. However, the complexity of these virtualized environments presents additional management challenges. Unfortunately, many traditional approaches may be either not effective well for reducing downtime or migration time, or not suitable well for Xen VMs platforms. This paper presents the design and implementation of a novel Slowdown Scheduling Algorithm (SSA) for Xen live VM migration. In our SSA methodology, the CPU resources which have been assigned to migration domain are decrease properly. That is, the dirtying page rate is reduced according to the decrease of CPU activity. Experimental results illustrate that our SSA approach can shorten both the total migration time and downtime obviously under high dirty page rate environment.