Distributed Shared Memory based Live VM Migration

Live virtual machine migration is an essential tool for dynamic resource management in current data centers. Many techniques have been developed to achieve this goal with minimum service interruption. In this paper, we propose a pre-copy live VM migration using Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) computing model. The setup is built using two identical computation nodes to construct the environment services architecture namely the virtualization infrastructure, the shared storage server, and the DSM and High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster. The custom DSM framework is based on a low latency memory update Grappa. HPC cluster with OPENMPI and MPI libraries support parallelization and auto-parallelization work load by using CPUs computation nodes. The DSM allows the cluster CPUs to access the same memory space pages resulting in a lower memory data updates based on locality attributes updates, which reduces the amount of data transferred through the network. This model achieves a good enhancement of the live VM migration metrics. Downtime is reduced by 50% in the idle workload of Windows VM and 66.6% in case of Ubuntu Linux idle workload. In general, this model not only reduces the downtime and the total amount of data sent, but also does not degrade other metrics like the total migration time and the application performance.