Effective live migration of virtual machines using partitioning and affinity aware-scheduling

During maintenance and disaster recovery scenarios, Virtual Machine (VM) inter-site migrations usually take place over limited bandwidth-typically Wide Area Network (WAN)-which is highly affected by the amount of inter-VM traffic that becomes separated during the migration process. This causes both a degradation of the Quality of Service (QoS) of inter-communicating VMs and an increase in the total migration time due to congestion of the migration link. We consider the problem of scheduling VM migration in those scenarios. In the first stage, we resort to graph partitioning theory in order to partition the VMs into groups with high intra-group communication. In the second stage, we devise an affinity-based scheduling algorithm for controlling the order of the migration groups by considering their inter-group traffic. Comprehensive simulations and real-life experimental results show that our approach is able to decrease the volume of separated traffic by a factor larger than 30%.