Adaptive live migration of virtual machines under limited network bandwidth

Abstract

Live migration is a crucial feature in existing virtualization platforms. Since memory is dirtied rapidly during the execution of a virtual machine (VM), boosting memory migration speed becomes a significant factor in guaranteeing a high-level success ratio and efficiency. However, the statically-configured migration strategy cannot cope with various workloads running in VMs, resulting in frequently aborted migration processes and low success ratio. This paper proposed a one-for-all migration architecture called Adaptive Live Migration (AdaMig) to address these issues. This QEMU-based solution dynamically switches migration methods and tunes related parameters by monitoring the run-time statistics from the migration process and the physical host. Once AdaMig detects the tendency that migration cannot converge, it will switch to another migration method to synchronize remaining dirty pages. During the whole process, AdaMig also dynamically tunes migration parameters according to current resources available in the physical host and migration efficiency. Experimental results reflect that AdaMig improves the success ratio from 26.7% to 93.3% over various workloads, and migration time is reduced by up to 45.5% in comparison with the original solution in QEMU.