Adaptive live migration to improve load balancing in virtual machine environment

Abstract

Load balancing is one of the main challenges in a Virtual Machine (VM) Environment in order to ensure equal utilization of all the available resources while avoiding overloading a subset of machines. In this paper, we propose an efficient load balancing strategy based on VM live migration. Unlike previous work, our strategy records the history of mappings to inform future placement decisions. We also apply a workload-Adaptive live migration algorithm in order to minimize VM downtime and improve the user experience. The evaluation shows that our load balancing technique is faster than previous approaches, thus reducing the decision generating latency by as much as 79%. Furthermore, the results also show that we provide minimal downtime. Compared with competitors, our proposed migration mechanism reduces the downtime by up to 73%. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.