Instant Virtual Machine Live Migration.

Live migration of virtual machines (VMs) is an important tool for data center operators to achieve maintenance, power management, and load balancing. The relatively high cost of live migration makes it difficult to employ live migration for rapid load balancing or power management operations, leaving much of its promised benefits unused. The advance of fast network interconnects has led to the development of distributed shared memory (DSM) that allows a cluster of nodes to utilize remote memory with relatively low overhead. In this paper, we explore VM live migration over DSM. We present and evaluate a novel live migration algorithm on our own DSM implementation. The evaluation of live migrating various VMs executing real-life workloads shows that live migration over DSM can reduce the total migration time by 70% and the total amount of transferred data by 65% on average. The absolute average total migration time of only 1.1 s demonstrates the potential of live migration over DSM to lead to better load balancing, energy management, and total cost of ownership.