Skip to main content

Cost of Virtual Machine Live Migration in Clouds: A Performance Evaluation

  • Conference paper
Cloud Computing (CloudCom 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 5931))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Virtualization has become commonplace in modern data centers, often referred as “computing clouds”. The capability of virtual machine live migration brings benefits such as improved performance, manageability and fault tolerance, while allowing workload movement with a short service downtime. However, service levels of applications are likely to be negatively affected during a live migration. For this reason, a better understanding of its effects on system performance is desirable. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of live migration of virtual machines on the performance of applications running inside Xen VMs. Results show that, in most cases, migration overhead is acceptable but cannot be disregarded, especially in systems where availability and responsiveness are governed by strict Service Level Agreements. Despite that, there is a high potential for live migration applicability in data centers serving modern Internet applications. Our results are based on a workload covering the domain of multi-tier Web 2.0 applications.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Barham, P., Dragovic, B., Fraser, K., Hand, S., Harris, T., Ho, A., Neugebauer, R., Pratt, I., Warfield, A.: Xen and the art of virtualization. In: SOSP 2003: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 164–177. ACM, New York (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Buyya, R., Yeo, C., Venugopal, S., Broberg, J., Brandic, I.: Cloud computing and emerging IT platforms: Vision, hype, and reality for delivering computing as the 5th utility. Future Generation Computer Systems 25(6), 599–616 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Clark, C., Fraser, K., Hand, S., Hansen, J.G., Jul, E., Limpach, C., Pratt, I., Warfield, A.: Live migration of virtual machines. In: NSDI 2005: Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation, pp. 273–286. USENIX Association, Berkeley (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Milojicic, D., Douglis, F., Paindaveine, Y., Wheeler, R., Zhou, S.: Process migration survey. ACM Computing Surveys 32(3), 241–299 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Nagarajan, A.B., Mueller, F., Engelmann, C., Scott, S.L.: Proactive fault tolerance for HPC with xen virtualization. In: ICS 2007: Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Supercomputing, pp. 23–32. ACM, New York (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Barbosa, A.C., Sauve, J., Cirne, W., Carelli, M.: Evaluating architectures for independently auditing service level agreements. Future Generation Computer Systems 22(7), 721–731 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Iyer, R., Illikkal, R., Zhao, L., Makineni, S., Newell, D., Moses, J., Apparao, P.: Datacenter-on-chip architectures: Tera-scale opportunities and challenges. Intel. Technology Journal 11(03) (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Uhlig, R., Neiger, G., Rodgers, D., Santoni, A.L., Martins, F.C.M., Anderson, A.V., Bennett, S.M., Kagi, A., Leung, F.H., Smith, L.: Intel. virtualization technology. Computer 38(5), 48–56 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Cherkasova, L., Gardner, R.: Measuring CPU overhead for I/O processing in the Xen virtual machine monitor. In: ATEC 2005: Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, p. 24. USENIX Association, Berkeley (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Apparao, P., Iyer, R., Zhang, X., Newell, D., Adelmeyer, T.: Characterization & analysis of a server consolidation benchmark. In: VEE 2008: Proceedings of the fourth ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS Iinternational Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, pp. 21–30. ACM, New York (2008)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Casazza, J.P., Greenfield, M., Shi, K.: Redefining server performance characterization for virtualization benchmarking. Intel. Technology Journal 10(3), 243–251 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Zhao, M., Figueiredo, R.J.: Experimental study of virtual machine migration in support of reservation of cluster resources. In: VTDC 2007: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing, pp. 1–8. ACM, New York (2007)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Travostino, F., Daspit, P., Gommans, L., Jog, C., de Laat, C., Mambretti, J., Monga, I., van Oudenaarde, B., Raghunath, S., Wang, P.Y.: Seamless live migration of virtual machines over the man/wan. Future Generation Computer Systems 22(8), 901–907 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Sobel, W., Subramanyam, S., Sucharitakul, A., Nguyen, J., Wong, H., Patil, S., Fox, A., Patterson, D.: Cloudstone: Multi-platform, multi-language benchmark and measurement tools for web 2.0. In: CCA 2008: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Cloud Computing (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Apache Software Foundation: Olio, http://incubator.apache.org/olio

  16. Sun Microsystems: Project Faban, http://faban.sunsource.net

  17. Amazon Web Services LLC: Amazon Web Services, http://aws.amazon.com

  18. Subramanyam, S., Smith, R., van den Bogaard, P., Zhang, A.: Deploying web 2.0 applications on sun servers and the opensolaris operating system. Technical report, Sun Microsystems (2009)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Voorsluys, W., Broberg, J., Venugopal, S., Buyya, R. (2009). Cost of Virtual Machine Live Migration in Clouds: A Performance Evaluation. In: Jaatun, M.G., Zhao, G., Rong, C. (eds) Cloud Computing. CloudCom 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5931. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10665-1_23

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10665-1_23

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10664-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10665-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics