Coordinating Virtual Machine Migrations in Enterprise Data Centers and Clouds

Virtual machine(VM) migration usually requires a considerable amount of system resources such as the network bandwidth. In the case of multiple simultaneous migrations, which happens regularly in data center operations, such resource demands will increase dramatically and are difficult to be satisfied immediately. In this paper we propose a scheduling method for multiple VM migrations to guarantee the fast completion of those tasks and hence the reduced impacts on system performance. We consider two aspects to achieve that. Firstly we analyze the VM migration behavior and build a simulation tool to predict the time of multiple migrations under different links conditions and VM characteristics. By analyzing the simulation outputs, we can discover the best bandwidth sharing policy for each network link, i.e., the number of concurrent migrations that can lead to the shortest completion time. Based on the link sharing policy, we further propose a bin-packing algorithm to organize bandwidth resources from all the network links, and allocate them to different migration tasks. As a result of our global resource assignment, the migration tasks can fully utilize available resources in the whole network to achieve the fast completion. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our migration scheduling approach. Keywords-resource scheduling; optimization