VM Project: VM Live Migration Paper Survey and Presentation

Author: Kun Ting Chen

1) Motivation: The Internet has become an indispensible media where people access
various on-line services such as executing personalized applications, browsing and
publishing Web contents, communicating with friends and co-workers, and so on.
To achieve this, from the server-side perspective, providing an Internet service
requires sufficient computational power as well as other kinds of resources such as
memory, disk space, and network bandwidth, in order to maintain satisfactory
service quality. To manage hardware resources well, system virtual machines have
provided a way to share the resources with multiple VMs each running an OS and
with applications. But there is a problem when the number of services increases
and their popularity vary, respectively. So how to ensure quality of service without
acquiring excessive computing resources becomes a challenge. We are interested
in resource management in multiple VMs, and now we plan to study that OS
instances may be rearranged across machines in a cluster to relieve load on
congested hosts. In the VM project, I will present the paper survey results of at
least 3 existing works on VM live migration and off-service migration (migration
when not running OS), and will install Xen on 2 real machines interconnected in a
local area network. I will configure and install Fedora OSs on Xen and survey the
hardware management utility provided in Xen. While the study of hardware
management utility for multiple OSs in Xen is not closely related to the goal of
our project, it acts a supporting work in the implementation of live migration
algorithms suggested in the paper. In the end we plan to show the implementation
of VM live migration between two physical machines. Our future work is to
configure the two machines with high and low workload, respectively. We will
live migrate VMs from high load machines to low load machines. According to
the load received in machines, we will put one of the physical machines in a free
pool for out of service when the total load received is low and one machine is
another to host all the VMs by live migrating them to one machine, or balance the
load when both machines receive high load.

2) List of research papers, documents referenced:

[Clark] C. Clark, K. Fraser, S. Hand, J. G. Hansen, E. Jul, C. Limpach, I. Pratt, and
A.Warfield. “Live Migration of Virtual Machines.” NSDI, 2005.
[Luo] Y. Luo, B. Zhang, X. Wang, Z. Wang, and Y. Sun, “Live and incremental
whole-system migration of virtual machines using block-bitmap,” in Proceedings of
Cluster 2008: IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing. IEEE Computer
Society, 2008.
[Sapuntzakis] C. P. Sapuntzakis, R. Chandra, B. Pfaff, J. Chow, M. S. Lam, and
M.Rosenblum. “Optimizing the migration of virtual computers.” In Proc. of the 5th
Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI-02), December
2002.

3) A structured plan of work, with intermediate milestones and a time line

Milestones Accomplishment
4/13 1. Survey VM migration papers
2. Write Project proposal
4/27 1. Study paper “Live Migration of Virtual Machines” and gather
related works and resources
2. Survey Xen installation and configuration issues
5/4 1. Install Xen on two machines in a local area network.
2. Study paper “Live and incremental whole-system migration of
virtual machines using block-bitmap“ and gather related works and
resources
3. Survey Xen VM platform for hardware resource management
5/11 1. Install Fedora 8 on Xen on both machines, and configure them with
same application environment.
2. Study paper “Optimizing the migration of virtual computers”
5/18 1. Configure Xen and use Xen to manage hardware resources among
VMs.
2. Think about the live migration issues and explore the problems and
solutions studied in the papers
3. Prepare slide presentation including the papers, related resources,
Xen use experiences
6/1 1. Implement live migration algorithm in the Xen machines

4) A description of what you plan to submit at the end of the term as a result of
this work
I will present the paper survey results of at least 3 existing works on VM live
migration and off-service migration (migration when not running OS), and will
show the process of configuring Xen and the surveying results of the hardware
management utility in Xen. And in the end we plan to show the implementation of
live migration algorithms suggested in the papers.
5) Future works
Our future work is to configure the two machines with high and low workload,
respectively. We will live migrate VMs from high load machines to low load
machines. In doing this, we will run another physical machine which issues client
requests. Each VM will configure to serve one of the web, application, and
database servers. During the service of client requests, according to the load
received in machines, we will put one of the physical machines in a free pool for
out of service when the total load received is low and one machine is another to
host all the VMs by live migrating them to one machine, or balance the load when
both machines receive high load.