Planning live-migrations to prepare servers for maintenance

Abstract

In a virtualized data center, server maintenance is a common but still critical operation. A prerequisite is indeed to relocate elsewhere the VirtualMachines (VMs) running on the production servers to prepare them for the maintenance. When the maintenance focuses several servers, this may lead to a costly relocation of several VMs so the migration plan must be chose wisely. This however implies to master numerous human, technical, and economical aspects that play a role in the design of a quality migration plan. In this paper, we study migration plans that can be decided by an operator to prepare for an hardware upgrade or a server refresh on multiple servers. We exhibit performance bottleneck and pitfalls that reduce the plan efficiency. We then discuss and validate possible improvements deduced from the knowledge of the environment peculiarities.