A performance analysis of precopy, postcopy and hybrid live VM migration algorithms in scientific cloud computing environment

Abstract

Virtualization technology plays a vital role in cloud computing. One of the core features of virtualization technology is live virtual machine migration. The live migration is a process of transferring the complete state of virtual machine between physical hosts without any service interruption. This capability is being widely used for the purpose of system maintenance, load balancing, energy efficiency, reconfiguration and fault tolerance. Live migration has been extensively studied for commercial workloads and the ongoing research is mainly focusing on the performance improvements of well-known live migration algorithms. Today, scientific communities are actively thinking to take the advantage of cloud computing for scientific workloads. In this paper, we analyze the performance of well-known precopy, postcopy and hybrid live migration algorithms and examine the migration times of VMs running high throughput computing (HTC) jobs in a scientific cloud computing environment. The results of our research not only show the performance comparison of live migration algorithms but also will be helpful when selecting a live migration algorithm in scientific cloud computing environment.