SDN-Based Virtual Machine Management for Cloud Data Centers

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm to logically centralize the network control plane and automate the configuration of individual network elements. At the same time, in cloud data centers (DCs), although network and server resources are collocated and managed by a single administrative entity, disjoint control mechanisms are used for their respective management. In this paper, we propose a unified server-network resource management for such converged information and communication technology (ICT) environments. We present a SDN-based orchestration framework for live virtual machine (VM) management that exploits temporal network information to migrate VMs and minimize the network-wide communication cost of the resulting traffic dynamics. A prototype implementation is presented, and a cloud DC testbed is used to evaluate the impact of diverse orchestration algorithms. Our live VM management has been shown to reduce the network-wide communication cost, especially for the high-cost and congestion-prone core and aggregation layers of the DC. Our results show an increase in network-wide throughput by over six times, as well as over 70% communication cost reduction by migrating less than 50% of the VMs.