Performance of Memory Virtualization Using Hybrid Live Migration of Virtual Machines

Abstract

 Abstract —Today, Infrastructure-as-a-service providers are trying to minimize the cost of data center operations, while maintaining the Service Level Agreements. This can be achieved by one of the advanced state-of-the-art services of virtualization - the live migration capability. Live migration is defined as the process of transferring an active virtual machine from one physical machine to another without any disconnection. This is achieved by transferring all of the encapsulated states of the VM from one host to another. It has become an essential tool for efficient management of resources in a data center by enabling server consolidation and load balancing. There are two classical migration techniques, namely - pre-copy and post-copy, which employ different memory transfer mechanism during the offloading of a VM. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid live migration technique by combining the existing pre-copy and post-copy approaches. Compare to its counterparts, our hybrid technique is a fast, efficient and a reliable migration technique.