Guide-copy: Fast and silent migration of virtual machine for datacenters

Abstract

Cloud infrastructure providers deploy Dynamic Resource Management (DRM) to minimize the cost of datacenter operation, while maintaining the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Such DRM schemes depend on the capability to migrate virtual machine (VM) images. However, existing migration techniques are not suitable for highly utilized clouds due to their latency and bandwidth critical memory transfer mechanisms. In this paper, we propose guide-copy migration, a novel VM migration scheme to provide a fast and silent migration, which works nicely under highly utilized clouds. The guide-copy migration transfers only the memory pages accessed at the destination node in the near future by running a guide version of the VM at the source node and a migrated VM at the destination node simultaneously during the migration. The guide-copy migration's highly accurate and low-bandwidth memory transfer mechanism enables a fast and silent VM migration to maintain the SLA of all VMs in the cloud.