Scatter-Gather Live Migration of Virtual Machines

We introduce a new metric for live migration of virtual machines (VM) called eviction time defined as the time to evict the state of one or more VMs from the source host. Eviction time determines how quickly the source can be taken offline or its resources repurposed for other VMs. In traditional live migration, such as pre-copy and post-copy, eviction time equals the total migration time because the source is tied up until the destination receives the entire VM. We present Scatter-Gather live migration which decouples the source and destination during migration to reduce eviction time when the destination is slow. The source scatters the memory of VMs to multiple nodes, including the destination and one or more intermediaries. Concurrently, the destination gathers the VMs’ memory from the intermediaries and the source. Thus eviction from the source is no longer bottlenecked by the reception speed of the destination. We support simultaneous live eviction of multiple VMs and exploit deduplication to reduce network overhead. Our Scatter-Gather implementation in the KVM/QEMU platform reduces the eviction time by up to a factor of 6 against traditional pre-copy and post-copy while maintaining comparable total migration time when the destination is slower than the source.