An optimization of pre-copy approach for live migration of virtual machines

Nowadays pre-copy based live virtual machine migration is already widely accepted one standard feature in hypervisor implementation to achieve high availability objective in cloud computing environment. Yet along with more production deployment, existing pre-copy's performance becomes a major concern which leads both industry and academic to incubate possible enhancement solutions. To improve pre-copy efficiency in cloud environment, this paper proposed an optimized Link Bandwidth based Pre-copy Migration (LBPM) which can automatically leverage built-in self-adapting migration logic to fit for real production environment. The internal algorithm firstly introduces a new measure index (named as dirty probability) which is generated by carefully designed principles with temporal locality and spatial locality, then systemically consolidates real-time available link bandwidth with VM candidate dirty page pool to dynamically determine migration window size in each pre-copy iteration and finally conducts data transferring within overall acceptable criteria. Experiment results show LBPM is much better than existing pre-copy based approach of Xen in terms of downtime, total migration time and the number of transferred pages. © 2015 by Binary Information Press