Acinonyx: Dynamic Flow Scheduling for Virtual Machine Migration in SDN-Enabled Clouds

Cloud providers rely on virtualization technology for efficient data center management and service delivery. Live Virtual Machine (VM) Migration is one of the critical features of this technology enabling cloud providers to relocate VMs between servers without disrupting applications currently running on it. One of the key challenges of VM live migration is that it creates elephant flows over the network links connecting the source to destination servers due to the transfer of the entire memory and possibly disks of the VM. In this paper, we leverage software-defined networking (SDN) and propose a dynamic flow scheduling approach called Acinonyx. Our solution is designed to minimize the negative impact of live VM migration on data center network traffic and reduce migration time in cloud data centers with multiple network paths between servers. Acinonyx adaptively installs flow entries on the switches of the shortest path with the lowest congestion and redirects VM migration traffic to the appropriate path. We describe the implementation of the proposed solution over our testbed environment, where we use OpenStack for managing commodity servers and OpenDaylight SDN controller for managing the OpenFlow switches. Our experimental results show that Acinonyx can significantly reduce the migration time of VMs while improving the overall network throughput for other VM communications.