On the necessity of VM migration: Simulation on datacenter network Resources

Currently, the network I/O is greater than the disk I/O. Even further, network I/O capacity increases at a faster rate than the capacity of hard disk I/O. If the gap between the disk I/O and the network I/O continues to grow, current technologies may not be the optimum choices anymore. Virtual machine migration is one of the most frequently mentioned operations in datacenters. One of the purposes of virtual machine migrations is to ensure the data used by the virtual machine and the running virtual machine are close together. However, if there is always enough network capacity in a datacenter, the locality migration might not be necessary. Virtual machine migrations require comparably long period of freeze time, and by showing no migration does not degrade the overall performance under some situations, the use of virtual machine migration under certain situation may be shown unnecessary. In this paper, the simulation is carried out to show that with network capacity enhanced, virtual machine migrations of some cases may not be necessary.