Virtual Machine Migration Enabled Cloud Resource Management: A Challenging Task

TL;DR

This paper surveys virtual machine migration techniques in cloud data centers, highlighting their role in resource management, discussing applications, and proposing a queue-based model for efficient VM memory migration.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of VM migration methods and applications, and introduces a novel queue-based model for VM memory page migration.

Findings

Live migration minimizes service downtime.

VM migration supports load balancing and fault management.

Open research issues are identified for future work.

Abstract

Virtualization technology reduces cloud operational cost by increasing cloud resource utilization level. The incorporation of virtualization within cloud data centers can severely degrade cloud performance if not properly managed. Virtual machine (VM) migration is a method that assists cloud service providers to efficiently manage cloud resources while eliminating the need of human supervision. VM migration methodology migrates current-hosted workload from one server to another by either employing live or non-live migration pattern. In comparison to non-live migration, live migration does not suspend application services prior to VM migration process. VM migration enables cloud operators to achieve various resource management goals, such as, green computing, load balancing, fault management, and real time server maintenance. In this paper, we have thoroughly surveyed VM migration methods and applications. We have briefly discussed VM migration applications. Some open research issues have been highlighted to represent future challenges in this domain. A queue based migration model has been proposed and discussed to efficiently migrate VM memory pages.