Implementing Scalable, Network-Aware Virtual Machine Migration for Cloud Data Centers

Abstract

Virtualization has been key to the success of Cloud Computing through the on-demand allocation of shared \nhardware resources to Virtual Machines (VM)s. However, the \nnetwork-agnostic placement of VMs over the underlying network topology can itself be a factor of performance degradation by causing congestion at the core layers of the infrastructure where bandwidth is heavily oversubscribed. In this paper, we design and implement S-CORE, a scalable live VM migration scheme to dynamically reallocate VMs to servers while minimizing the overall communication footprint of active traffic flows. We evaluate SCORE over diverse aggregate load and coordination policies. Our \nresults show that it can achieve up to a 87% communication \ncost reduction with a limited number of migration rounds, \nand can be easily accommodated within commodity hardware \nand hypervisor architectures. The associated memory, CPU, and network overhead are also minimum under typical Cloud Data Center workloads.