Weight based live migration of virtual machines

Abstract

Due to having many advantages, virtualization has been widely used and become a key technology of cloud computing. Live migration of virtual machines is the core technique of virtualization fields, but the existing pre-copy live migration approaches have problems of low copy efficiency and long total migration time, so we propose a weight based live migration algorithm of virtual machines in this paper, which adds weights to the dirty page information collected, preferentially selects and transfers the dirty pages that are not modified frequently, the dirty pages that are modified frequently are transferred after virtual machine is suspended. The algorithm effectively reduces the amount of memory pages transferred and the total migration time. Experiment results show that when virtual machine is under heavy load, the proposed algorithm considerably reduces the number of transferred memory pages and shortens the total migration time without significantly increment of the virtual machine downtime. © Springer-Verlag 2013.