TSMC: A Novel Approach for Live Virtual Machine Migration

Cloud computing attracted more and more attention in recent years, and virtualization technology is the key point for deploying infrastructure services in cloud environment. It allows application isolation and facilitates server consolidation, load balancing, fault management, and power saving. Live virtual machine migration can effectively relocate virtual resources and it has become an important management method in clusters and data centers. Existing precopy live migration approach has to iteratively copy redundant memory pages; another postcopy live migration approach would lead to a lot of page faults and application degradation. In this paper, we present a novel approach called TSMC (three-stage memory copy) for live virtual machine migration. In TSMC, memory pages only need to be transmitted twice at most and page fault just occurred in small part of dirty pages. We implement it in Xen and compare it with Xen’s original precopy approach. The experimental results under various memory workloads show that TSMC approach can significantly reduce the cumulative migration time and total pages transferred and achieve better network IO performance in the same time.