Implementing Scalable, Network-Aware Virtual Machine Migration for Cloud Data Centers

Virtualization has been key to the success of Cloud Computing through the on-demand allocation of shared hardware resources to Virtual Machines (VM)s. However, the network-agnostic placement of VMs over the underlying network topology can itself be a factor of performance degradation by causing congestion at the core layers of the infrastructure where bandwidth is heavily oversubscribed. In this paper, we design and implement S-CORE, a scalable live VM migration scheme to dynamically reallocate VMs to servers while minimizing the overall communication footprint of active traffic flows. We evaluate S- CORE over diverse aggregate load and coordination policies. Our results show that it can achieve up to a 87% communication cost reduction with a limited number of migration rounds, and can be easily accommodated within commodity hardware and hypervisor architectures. The associated memory, CPU, and network overhead are also minimum under typical Cloud Data Center workloads.