Reducing Virtual Machine Live Migration Overhead via Workload Analysis

A key feature in virtualization technology is the Live Migration, which allows a Virtual Machine (VM) to be moved from a physical host to another without execution interruption. This feature enables the implementation of more sophisticated policies inside a cloud environment, such as energy and computational resources optimization, and improvement of quality-of-service. However live migration can impose severe performance degradation for the VM application and cause multiple impacts in service provider infrastructure, such as network congestion and co-located VM performance degradation. Different of several studies we consider the VM workload an important factor and we argue that carefully choosing a proper moment to migrate a VM can reduce the live migration penalties. This paper introduces a method to identify the workload cycles of a VM and based on that information it can postpone or, in some situations. In our experiments, using relevant benchmarks the proposed method was able to reduce up to 43% of network data transfer and reduce up to 74% of live migration time when compared to traditional consolidation strategies that perform live migration without considering the VM workload.