Using live virtual machine migration to improve resource efficiency in virtualized data centers

Efficient resource management is still an open problem in data centers. Although there has been continued improvement in the performance of such large scale systems, the improvements have been mostly at the expense of adding more servers to the system; increasing space requirements and power consumption sometimes without making an effort to better utilize available resources. Modern data centers are growing at a such high pace that space and power consumption are becoming limiting factors. Virtualization has the potential to address these limitations by increasing resource efficiency throughout the data center. Because hardware resources are being shared by different virtual machines (VM), it is important that the placement of a VM in a physical host does not degrade the performance the overall system. In this thesis, we are focused analyzing the benefits that live VM migration can have on virtualized data centers. Specifically, it is our goal to develop a robust VM migration framework that can be used to improve resource efficiency throughout the data center. In this thesis we propose a metric that we can accurately quantify the load of a virtualized enterprise server. We demonstrate how this metric can be used to load balance a entire system. We also consider extension to our framework to consider reducing power consumption.