SmartShuffle: Managing Online Virtual Machine Shuffle in Virtualized Data Centers

Virtual machine (VM) live migration provides spatial flexibility by rearranging VM placement (i.e., VM shuffle) in several scenarios, including server consolidation, power consumption saving, fault tolerance, QoS management and network congestion resolving. However, VM live migration would consume scarce bandwidth and even cause network congestion. Since the bandwidth used by VM migration is usually the same as the services running in the VM, migration traffic would dominate network path and affect other application traffic as the traffic of a VM migration is usually several GBs. It gets worse in VM shuffle where plenty of VMs are needed to be moved. In this paper, we explore the opportunity to manage online VM shuffle and minimize the impact to data center networks. An efficient online VM shuffle scheduling method named SmartShuffle is presented. SmartShuffle tries to minimize the VM shuffle duration by coordinating VM migration in a proper scheduling order. VMs benefiting others maximally are migrated preferentially. We employ the simulated annealing algorithm to search for a solution for SmartShuffle. Our evaluation shows that SmartShuffle decreases the shuffle duration dramatically.