A Partners Assisted Virtual Machine Live Storage Migration for Intensive Disk I/O Workloads

Live migration of virtual machine (VM) enables mobility of VM and contributes to advantages of virtualization like energy saving, high availability, fault tolerance and work load balancing. However solutions of VMs' migration in both theoretical and industrial areas concentrate more on memory migration other than storage migration. Lots of applications with intensive disk I/O operations rely on local storage, especially when it comes to high performance computing. Migration of shared storage is also of necessity for consolidation and workload balance. Current approaches on storage migration can hardly work effectively in disk I/O intensive environment. They cannot reduce migration time and guarantee the disk I/O performance of VMs at the same time. This paper proposes an approach called Partners Assisted Storage Migration (PASM). We are the first to utilize disk I/O ability of pre-allocated storage nodes to relieve the competition between VMs' intensive disk I/O and storage migration. It can migrate VMs' storage effectively comparing to current methods: post-copy and write-mirror. Experiments including single VM's migration and multiple VMs' migration show that PASM can save 78.9% migration time and achieve additional 27.1% in disk I/O performance over existing methods.