Virt-LM: a benchmark for live migration of virtual machine

ABSTRACT

Virtualization technology has been widely applied in data centers and IT infrastructures, with advantages of server consolidation and live migration. Through live migration, data centers could flexibly move virtual machines among different physical machines to balance workloads, reduce energy consumption and enhance service availability.

Today's data centers can grow to a huge scale. This implies that frequent live migration would be desirable for the economic use of hardware resources. Then, the performance of the live migration strategy will be an issue. So, we need a reliant evaluation method to choose the software and hardware environments that will produce the best live migration performance.

However, there is not a complete live migration benchmark available currently. In addition, the existing evaluation methodologies select different metrics, different workloads and different test means. Thus, it is difficult to compare their results.

In this paper we first survey the current research and their evaluation methods on live migration. We then summarize the critical issues for the live migration evaluation and also raise other unreported potential problems.

We propose our solutions and present an implementation in our live migration benchmark -- Virt-LM. This is a benchmark for comparing live migration performance among different software and hardware environments in a data center scenario. We detail its design and provide some experimental results to validate its effectiveness.

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Index Terms

• Software and its engineering