Poster: Reducing the Migration Times of Multiple VMs on WANs

It is difficult to statically minimize the time required to transfer multiple VMs across a WAN. One approach is to migrate a large number of VMs concurrently, but this leads to long migration times of each individual VM. Long migration times are problematic in catastrophic circumstances where needed resources can fail within a short period of time. Thus, it is important to shorten both the total time required to migrate multiple VMs and the migration time of individual VMs. This work proposes a feedback-based controller that adapts the number of concurrent VM migrations in response to changes in a WAN. The controller implements an algorithm inspired by the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm in order to regulate the number of VMs in transit depending on network conditions. The experiments show that the controller shortens the individual migration time by up to 4.3 fold compared to that of the static VM migrations.