Migration, assignment, and scheduling of jobs in virtualized environment

Abstract

Migration is an interesting issue for managing resource utilization and performance in clusters. Recent advances in server virtualization have made migration a practical method to achieve these goals. Especially, the live migration of virtualized servers made their pausing times negligible. However, migration of a virtual machine (VM) can slow down other collocated VMs in multiresource shared systems, where all the system resources are shared among collocated VMs. In parallel execution environment, such sudden slow-down phase of systems is called system noise; it may slow down overall systems while increasing the variability of system performance. When we consider the virtual machine assignment problem as resource allocation, those performance issues are hard to be properly treated. In this work, we address how to consider performance in assigning VMs. To achieve this goal, we model a migration process of a VM instance as a pair of jobs that run at the hosts of sender and receiver. We propose a method to analyze the migration time and the performance impact on multiresource shared systems for completing given VM assignment plan. This study may contribute to create more robust performance in virtualized environment.