Policy-Based Agents for Virtual Machine Migration in Cloud Data Centers

Cloud data centers are networked server farms commonly composed of heterogeneous servers with a wide variety of computing capacities. Virtualization technology, in Cloud data centers, has improved server utilization and server consolidation. However, virtual machines may require unbalanced levels of computing resources (e.g., a virtual machine running a compute-intensive application with low memory requirements) causing resource usage imbalances within physical servers. In this paper, an agent-based distributed approach capable of balancing different types of workloads (e.g., memory workload) by using virtual machine live migration is proposed. Agents acting as server managers are equipped with 1) a collaborative workload balancing protocol, and 2) a set of workload balancing policies (e.g., resource usage migration thresholds and virtual machine migration heuristics) to simultaneously consider both server heterogeneity and virtual machine heterogeneity. The experimental results show that policy-based workload balancing is effectively achieved despite dealing with server heterogeneity and heterogeneous workloads.