Adaptive Live VM Migration in Share-Nothing IaaS-Clouds with LiveFS

Live migration is a versatile option when it comes to attain load-balancing in IaaS-cloud architectures. Liveness, reliability and conformance to SLAs may all be achieved by moving a VM that creates excessive work from its current physical machine (PM) to a less busy node. Despite its promising features, live migration is an expensive operation in terms of resources. The situation gets further exacerbated when the movement involves PMs working off different file-systems which is often the case in shared-nothing IaaS-cloud infrastructures. In this paper, we suggest an approach that adapts the migration operation based on the I/O activity of the originating-VM. We introduce LiveFS, a FUSE-file system which traps all I/Os and helps determine how to best ship virtual disk segments across PMs in a share-nothing IaaS-cloud. Through prototyping and experimentation, we show that LiveFS can improve the shipment of VMs for diverse types of workloads. In particular, LiveFS succeeds in reducing the Total Migration Time by up to 64% compared to the "pre-copy" live migration technique. Furthermore during migration, we attain up-to 19% less I/O-delay if compared to the "post-copy" live-migration approach.