Live Migration of Virtual Machines Based on Dirty Page Similarity

Abstract

Pre-copy-based Virtual Machine (VM) live migration seamlessly migrates the running VM to the target physical server by pre-copying memory pages and realizing updates through loop iterations. This method, which has high reliability and robustness, can effectively achieve load balancing and reduce energy consumption. It is widely used in the industry to manage server cluster resources. However, it also involves many problems, such as many dirty memory pages resulting from repeated transmission and convergence failure of iterative transmission. Hence, pre-copy live migration cannot efficiently allocate server cluster resources. To resolve these problems, a VM pre-copy live migration technology based on the similarity of dirty memory pages is proposed in this paper. The access priority of historical dirty memory pages was determined by calculating the similarity weight based on the Hamming distance. A priority-based delay transmission scheme for high dirty pages and low dirty pages was used to decrease the frequent transmission of high dirty memory pages, increase the convergence speed of the live-migration iterative copy process, and reduce the overall migration time of VMs. A comparative analysis of experimental results based on six dimensions showed that the proposed method achieved better migration efficiency than the conventional live migration strategy.