Network Performance-Aware Virtual Machine Migration in Data Centers

Abstract—Virtual machine (VM) consolidation and migration technology in data centers greatly improve the utilization of the server resource. While the previous work focuses on how to use VM migration to balance physical host utilization or optimize energy consumption, little attention has been given to network performance factors, such as link traffic load and inter-traffic between VMs in data centers. In this paper, we present MWLAN (Migration With Link And Node load consideration), a novel automatic data center VM migration system that can detect hotspots (e.g., network congestion and physical host over-loaded) and dynamically remap VMs to improve the network performance. The VM migration approach proposed in MWLAN can efficiently balance the network link load and relieve the local data center network congestion as well as considering physical host constraints. Moreover, experimental evaluations indicate that the proposed approach reduces the packet loss by up to 50 % and improves the average application TCP transfer rate by up to 24% compared to the other approaches when the data center network overloaded. Keywords-virtualization; virtual machine migration; data center; load balancing I