Analysing the Migration Time of Live Migration of Multiple Virtual Machines
Kateryna Rybina, Abhinandan Patni, Alexander Schill · 2014
Workload consolidation is one of the common approaches applied to achieve energy efficiency in data centres. It allows to reduce the number of physical machines needed to run the applications and thus, save energy. Workload consolidation can be realized via live migration of virtual machines (VMs) from one server to another with the aim to power off idle machines. In spite of innumerable benefits, the VM migration process introduces additional costs to the system in terms of migration time, during which the quality of provided services may be declined, and the energy overhead. The migration time depends on the applications that run on the VMs. The VMs which run simultaneously on the physical machine compete for the available resources, and thus, the interference effects that occur, influence the migration time. This paper investigates into the influence of workload as well as interference effects on the migration time of multiple VMs. In our experiments we utilize benchmarks from the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suite and use Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) as a hypervisor. We show experimentally that interference effects occur and affect the migration time of VMs. We migrate multiple VMs in all possible combinations and investigate into the migration times.