A Guideline for Selecting Live Migration Policies and Implementations in Clouds

Live migration of virtual machines (VMs) is widely used for managing cloud computing platforms. However, live migration causes performance interference on cloud services running on migrated VMs or other VMs collocating with the services during or after migration. Although migration time and downtime are mainly for measuring live migration performance, cloud administrators must take live migration-performance interference into consideration. Since many live migration policies and implementations have been proposed recently, cloud administrators are required to choose an appropriate migration policy and/or implementation. For this study, we conducted several experiments and compared several migration methods quantitatively. According to our experimental results, we reveal the trade-offs of each migration policy and implementation that are not just related to downtime and migration time and present guidelines for selecting appropriate policies and implementations.