An Autonomous Network Aware VM Migration Strategy in Cloud Data Centres

Live virtual machine migration can have a major impact on how a cloud system performs, as it can consume significant amounts of network resources such as bandwidth. A virtual machine migration occurs when a host becomes over-utilised or underutilised. Migration contributes to an increase in consumption of network resources which leads to longer migration times and ultimately has a detrimental effect on the performance of a cloud system. In this paper, we propose an autonomous network aware virtual machine migration strategy that observes the current demand level of a network and performs appropriate actions based on what it is experiencing. The Artificial Intelligence technique known as Reinforcement Learning acts as a decision support system, enabling an agent to learn an optimal time to schedule a virtual machine migration depending on the current network traffic demand. We show that an autonomous agent can learn to utilise available network resources when network saturation occurs at peak times.