Optimizing Migration of Virtual Machines across Data-Centers

Managing virtual machines (VM) in large scale enterprise grid scenarios, commonly encountered in data centers, is extremely challenging. Currently, live VM migration is based on QoS non-conformance events; migration of a VM is initiated as soon as the aggregate resource (CPU and memory) requirements of the VMs on the physical machine (PM) exceed the capacity available on the PM. However, this paper establishes that, such `event-based´ migration can be extremely myopic. To overcome the limitations posed by the `event-based´ VM migration, this paper, proposes a new migration strategy based on `time-windows´. The paper outlines a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model and a heuristic solution for generating near-optimal rearrangements of the VMs on the PMs. The paper evaluates the solutions on various VM scenarios which show encouraging results.