Towards Economical Live Migration in Data Centers

Live migration of virtual machines (VMs) enables maintenance, load balancing, and power management in data centers. The cost of live migration on several key metrics combined with strict service-level objectives (SLOs), however, typically limits its practical application to situations where the underlying physical host has to undergo maintenance. As a consequence, the potential benefits of live migration with respect to increased resource usage and lower power consumption remain largely untouched. In this paper, we argue that live migration-aware SLOs combined with smart live migration algorithm selection provides an economically viable model for live migration in data centers. Based on a model predicting key parameters of VM live migration, an optimization algorithm selects the live migration technique that is expected to meet client SLOs while at the same time to optimize target metrics given by the data center operator. A comparison with the state-of-the-art shows that the presented guided live migration technique selection achieves significantly fewer SLO violations while, at the same time, minimizing the effect of live migration on the infrastructure.