SDN-based Order-aware Live Migration of Virtual Machines

Live migration is a key technique to transfer virtual machines (VMs) from one machine to another. Often multiple VMs need to be migrated in response to events such as server maintenance, load balancing, and impending failures. However, VM migration is a resource intensive operation that pressures the CPU, memory, and network resources of the source and destination hosts as well as intermediate network links. The live migration mechanism ends up contending for finite resources with the VMs that it needs to migrate, which prolongs the total migration time and worsens the performance of applications running inside the VMs. In this paper, we propose SOLive, a new approach to reduce resource contention between the migration process and the VMs being migrated. First, by considering the nature of VM workloads, SOLive manages the order in which multiple VMs are migrated to significantly reduce the total mi-gration time. Secondly, to reduce the network contention between the migration process and the VMs, SOLive uses a combination of software-defined networking-based resource reservation and scatter gather-based VM migration to quickly deprovision the source host. A prototype implementation of our approach in KVM/QEMU platform shows that SOLive quickly evicts VMs from the source host with low impact on VMs' performance.