On the Necessity of VM Migration: Simulation on Datacenter Network Resources

Abstract

With the exception of solid state drive, the network I/O generally increases at a faster pace than the I/O capacity of hard disk drive. If the gap between the disk I/O and the network I/O continues to grow, current technologies that are tuned to current state may not be the optimal choices anymore. One of such technologies may be virtual machine migration (VMM). VMM is one of the most frequently mentioned operations in datacenters. One of the purposes of VMM is to ensure the data used by the virtual machine (VM) and the VM using the data are close to each other. However, if the VMMs require longer period of freeze time, VMM under certain situations may be unnecessary. In this paper, a series of simulations are carried out to show that VMM of some cases may not be necessary with enhanced network capacity.