RLC - A reliable approach to fast and efficient live migration of virtual machines in the clouds

Abstract

Today, IaaS cloud providers are dynamically minimizing the cost of data centers operations, while maintaining the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Currently, this is achieved by the live migration capability, which is an advanced state-of-the-art technology of Virtualization. However, existing migration techniques suffer from high network bandwidth utilization, large network data transfer, large migration time as well as the destination's VM failure during migration. In this paper, we propose Reliable Lazy Copy (RLC) - a fast, efficient and a reliable migration technique. RLC provides a reasonable solution for high-efficiency and less disruptive migration scheme by utilizing the three phases of the process migration. For effective network bandwidth utilization and reducing the total migration time, we introduce a learning phase to estimate the writable working set (WWS) prior to the migration, resulting in an almost single time transfer of the pages. Our approach decreases the total data transfer by 1.16 x - 12.21x and the total migration time by a factor of 1.42x - 9.84x against the existing approaches, thus providing a fast and an efficient, reliable VM migration of the VMs in the cloud. © 2014 IEEE.