Prevent VM Migration in Virtualized Clusters via Deadline Driven Placement Policy

Abstract

VM consolidation has been shown as a promising technique for saving energy costs of a data center. It relies on VM migration to move user applications or jobs onto fewer numbers of physical servers during off peak hour. However, VM migration is a costly operation that could cause several concerns, such as performance degradation and system instability. Most existing works were proposed to minimize the migration cost for dynamic consolidation which migrates VM at the runtime when SLA violation or resource under-utilization is detected. In contrast, this paper aims to proactively prevent VM migration for semi-static VM consolidation by proposing a deadline driven VM placement strategy based on the awareness of the server turn-off time and job execution time. We evaluate our approach using a real HPC cluster trace as well as a set of synthetic generated workloads. The results show our approach can significantly reduce the number of migrations by 70% on the real trace. We also demonstrate that our approach can be resilient to different workload patterns by achieving consistent improvement around 50% over all the synthetic workloads.