Live Migration Impact on Virtual Datacenter Performance: Vmware vMotion Based Study

Cloud computing is the future wave of information technology that provides infrastructure, platform and application as on demand services with low cost and rapid scalability. Infrastructure resources virtualization is the backbone of cloud computing to meet on demand, rapid scalability and resource pooling as the main cloud computing characteristics. Live migration is one of the powerful features in datacenters virtualization. Hosts load balance, power saving, failure recovery and dynamic resource allocation are all dependent on having live migration for the virtual machines. So studying and modeling live migrations is important to predict its impact on the datacenter performance and to take the migration decision at the optimum times. In this paper, we study the impact of live migration on the datacenter resources network and power consumption for VMware environment. This overhead modeling can be used to estimate the live migration impact on datacenter resources utilization given the virtual machine and network characteristics. Based on this estimation, the network admin can be alerted with this estimated overhead in order to confirm the live migration request or to postpone it to another optimum time for minimum interruption on the running applications.