Application-aware Virtual Machine Migration in Data Centers

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IEEE INFOCOM Mini-conference
Shanghai, China,
Abstract. While virtual machine (VM) migration is allowing data centers to rebalance workloads across physical machines, the promise of a maximally utilized infrastructure is yet to be realized. Part of the challenge is due to the inherent dependencies between VMs comprising a multi-tier application, which introduce complex load interactions between the underlying physical servers. For example, simply moving an overloaded VM to a (random) underloaded physical machine can inadvertently overload the network. We introduce AppAware—a novel, computationally efficient scheme for incorporating (1) inter-VM dependencies and (2) the underlying network topology into VM migration decisions. Using simulations, we show that our proposed method decreases network traffic by up to 81% compared to a well known alternative VM migration method that is not application-aware.
Bibtex.
@inproceedings{jamjoom-INFOCOM-11,
author = {Vivek and Shrivastava and Petros and Zerfos and Kang-won and Lee and Hani and Jamjoom and Yew-Huey and Liu and Suman and Banerjee},
title = {{Application-aware Virtual Machine Migration in Data Centers}},
booktitle = {IEEE INFOCOM Mini-conference},
address = {Shanghai, China},
month = {April},
year = {2011}
}