A Genetic Algorithm Scheduling Approach for Virtual Machine Resources in a Cloud Computing Environment

Virtualization has been shown to be an attractive path to increase overall system resource utilization. The use of live virtual machine (VM) migration has enabled more effective sharing of system resources across multiple physical servers, resulting in an increase in overall performance. Live VM migration can be used to load balance virtualized clusters. To drive live migration, we need to be able to measure the current load imbalance. Further, we also need to accurately predict the resulting load imbalance produced by any migration.In this paper we present a new metric that captures the load of the physical servers and is a function of the resident VMs. This metric will be used to measure load imbalance and construct a load-balancing VM migration framework. The algorithm for balancing the load of virtualized enterprise servers follows a greedy approach, inductively predicting which VM migration will yield the greatest improvement of the imbalance metric in a particular step. We compare our algorithm to the leading commercially available load balancing solution - VMware's Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). Our results show that when we are able to accurately measure system imbalance, we can also predict future system state. We find that we can outperform DRS and improve performance up to 5%. Our results show that our approach does not impose additional performance impact and is comparable to the virtual machine monitor overhead.

Cloud providers generally run one or more Virtual Machine (VM) instances on the same physical machine. Though it increases data center utilization, it exposes VM to a co-location attack. VM placement and migration are the two strategies adopted for mitigating co-locations. Current methods for VM placement or VM migration consider only security as decision criteria and do not consider other factors like Quality-of-Service degradation, data center utilization, etc. This work proposes a placement and migration strategy for mitigation of co-location attacks with joint consideration of multi objectives like QoS, data center utilization, energy consumption, and security risks. A security-driven multi-criteria optimization -based VM placement policy is proposed. A joint consideration of multiobjective performance optimization along with co-location security risk minimization is done to design a novel VM placement policy based on user categorization. The policy can reduce the likelihood of co-location target VM with attacker VM without much degradation to the performance of VM and data center utilization. The solution mitigates co-location risks without much compromise to the performance of VM and data center resource utilization. The co-residence risk is mitigated by the categorization of users into three levels i.e. unlabeled, risky, and safe, and physical machines into two groups as safe and unsafe. The PMs available in data center is grouped into three different VM placement policies, they are undecided pool, safe pool and unsafe pool.

An essential role of cloud computing platform is to dynamically balance the load among the different servers in order to improve resource utilization and to avoid hotspots. Load balancing (LB) is done on both sides i.e. on provider as well as on consumer side. On provider side, load balancing is the problem of allocating virtual machines to servers at runtime. Virtual Machine need to be reassigned so that servers do not get overloaded as demand changes. On consumer side application load can be balanced which provides efficiency to the consumers. On cloud computing platform, load balancing of the entire system can be dynamically handled by using virtualization technology through which itÂbecomes possible to remap virtual machine and physical resources according to the change in load. However, in order to improve performance, the virtual machines have to fully utilize its resources and services by adapting to computing environment dynamically. The load balancing with proper allocation of resources must be guaranteed in order to improve resource utility.

Cloud computing is a very well known technology for all business people, software developers, end-users, and so on. Significant researches are going on to balance the cloud load. The migration of heavily loaded Virtual Machines (VMs) into lightly loaded Physical Machines (PMs) balances the Cloud load. In Resource Intensity Aware Load Balancing (RIAL) method, based on the weight of resources under utilization, it selected the VMs from heavily loaded PMs for migration and chosen the lightly loaded PMs as destination. An Improved RIAL was proposed to consider both lightly and heavily loaded PMs as destination. Later it was enhanced in the proposed Power Consumption Aware- Traffic Aware- IRIAL (PT-IRIAL) method with the consideration of power consumption, temperature and traffic measures to select the VMs for migration and select PMs for destination. From all these, in this current paper, the crossover and mutation process of GA is utilized to optimally select the migration VMs and choose the destination PMs. Thus this GA based load optimization algorithm optimally maps the migration VMs with the destination PMs efficiently.

Job scheduling is a necessary prerequisite for performance optimization and resource management in the cloud computing system. Focusing on accurate scaled cloud computing environment and efficient job scheduling under Virtual Machine (VM) resource and Server Level Agreement (SLA) constraints, we introduce the architecture of cloud computing platform and optimization job scheduling scheme in this study. The system model is comprised of clearly defined separate constituent parts, including portal, job scheduler, and resources pool. By analyzing the execution process of user jobs, we designed a novel job scheduling scheme based on reinforcement learning to minimize the makespan and Average Waiting Time (AWT) under the VM resource and deadline constraints, and employ parallel multi-age parallel technologies to balance the exploration and exploitation in learning process and accelerate the convergence of Q -learning algorithm. Both simulation and real cloud platform experiment results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed job scheduling scheme.

Impact of Factors Affecting Pre-copy Virtual Machine Migration Technique for Cloud Computing

Live virtual machine (VM) migration is a technique for achieving system load balancing in a cloud environment by transferring an active VM from one physical host to another. This technique has been proposed to reduce the downtime for migrating overloaded VMs, but it is still time- and cost-consuming, and a large amount of memory is involved in the migration process. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a Task-based System Load Balancing method using Particle Swarm Optimization (TBSLB-PSO) that achieves system load balancing by only transferring extra tasks from an overloaded VM instead of migrating the entire overloaded VM. We also design an optimization model to migrate these extra tasks to the new host VMs by applying Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). To evaluate the proposed method, we extend the cloud simulator (Cloudsim) package and use PSO as its task scheduling model. The simulation results show that the proposed TBSLB-PSO method significantly reduces the time taken for the load balancing process compared to traditional load balancing approaches. Furthermore, in our proposed approach the overloaded VMs will not be paused during the migration process, and there is no need to use the VM pre-copy process. Therefore, the TBSLB-PSO method will eliminate VM downtime and the risk of losing the last activity performed by a customer, and will increase the Quality of Service experienced by cloud customers.

In a cloud data center server, there could be many physical machines connected as clients. Each physical machine can hold multiple virtual machines. The effective working of the system is determined majorly on the parameters such as the utilization of the system which depends upon resource utilization by single Virtual Machine and Physical Machine resource utilization in total. To optimize the utilization, it is crucial to fetch the data, take the decision considering the situation, and finally take action by migrating the VM to decide the PM if needed. To automate this process and to make such decisions, it is necessary to appoint a monitor machine which can monitor the VM and PM individually, take and implement the actions needed. However, the monitor machine must implement multi-objective optimization thus considering other factors as well such as Qos, Energy saving, and reduction of time and distance while migrating.

Virtualization techniques effectively handle the growing demand for computing, storage, and communication resources in large-scale Cloud Data Centers (CDC). It helps to achieve different resource management objectives like load balancing, online system maintenance, proactive fault tolerance, power management, and resource sharing through Virtual Machine (VM) migration. VM migration is a resource-intensive procedure as VM’s continuously demand appropriate CPU cycles, cache memory, memory capacity, and communication bandwidth. Therefore, this process degrades the performance of running applications and adversely affects efficiency of the data centers, particularly when Service Level Agreements (SLA) and critical business objectives are to be met. Live VM migration is frequently used because it allows the availability of application service, while migration is performed. In this paper, we make an exhaustive survey of the literature on live VM migration and analyze the various proposed mechanisms. We first classify the types of Live VM migration (single, multiple and hybrid). Next, we categorize VM migration techniques based on duplication mechanisms (replication, de-duplication, redundancy, and compression) and awareness of context (dependency, soft page, dirty page, and page fault) and evaluate the various Live VM migration techniques. We discuss various performance metrics like application service downtime, total migration time and amount of data transferred. CPU, memory and storage data is transferred during the process of VM migration and we identify the category of data that needs to be transferred in each case. We present a brief discussion on security threats in live VM migration and categories them in three different classes (control plane, data plane, and migration module). We also explain the security requirements and existing solutions to mitigate possible attacks. Specific gaps are identified and the research challenges in improving the performance of live VM migration are highlighted. The significance of this work is that it presents the background of live VM migration techniques and an in depth review which will be helpful for cloud professionals and researchers to further explore the challenges and provide optimal solutions.

Network resources and traffic priorities can be utilized to distribute requested tasks across edge nodes at the edge layer. However, due to the variety of tasks, the edge nodes have an impact on data accessibility. Resource management approaches based on Virtual Machine (VM) migration, job prioritization, and other methods were used to overcome this problem. A Minimized Upgrading Batch VM Scheduling (MSBP) has recently been developed, which reduces the number of batches required to complete a system-scale upgrade and assigns bandwidth to VM migration matrices. However, due to poor resource sharing caused by suboptimal VM utilization, the MSBP was unable to effectively ensure the global best solutions. In order to distribute resources and schedule tasks optimally during VM migration, this paper proposes the MSBP with Multi-objective Optimization of Resource Allocation (MORA) method. The major goal of this proposed methodology is to take into account different objectives and solve the Pareto-front problem to enhance lifetime of the fog-edge network. First, it formulates an NP-hard challenge for MSBP by taking into account a variety of factors such as network sustainability, path contention, network delay, and cost-efficiency. The Multi-objective Krill Herd optimization (MoKH) algorithm is then used to address the NP-hard issue using the Pareto optimality rule and produce the best solution. First, it introduces an NP-hard challenge for MSBP by accounting in network sustainability, path contention, network latency, and cost-efficiency. The Pareto optimality rule is then implemented to overcome the NP-hard problem and provide the optimum solution employing the Multi-objective Krill Herd optimization (MoKH) algorithm. This increases network lifetime and improves resource allocation cost efficiency. Finally, the simulation results show that the MSBP-MORA distributes resources more efficiently and hence increases network lifetime when compared to other traditional algorithms.

In recent years, the adoption of multi-cloud environments has increased due to its ability to provide better performance, cost-effectiveness, and higher availability. However, managing resources in such environments is a challenging task. Load balancing and virtual machine (VM) migration are two critical techniques for resource management in multi-cloud environments. Load balancing helps to distribute the workload evenly among the cloud resources, while VM migration enables the dynamic allocation of resources based on the changing demands. This systematic review paper presents a comprehensive survey of load balancing and VM migration strategies in multi-cloud environments. The paper first introduces the concept of multicloud environments and the challenges of resource management in such environments. Then, the paper discusses the different load balancing and VM migration techniques that have been proposed for multi-cloud environments, including their advantages and limitations.

Virtual machine (VM) migration in the cloud computing (CC) environment is an important issue to solve many problems, such as: Load Balancing, accomplished by migrating VMs out of overloaded/overheated servers, and Server Consolidation, where servers can be selectively brought down for maintenance after migrating their workload to other servers. In this paper, we propose an efficient VM migration algorithm based on minimization of migrations in CC to improve efficiency and response the requirements for user and restrict of service level agreements (SLA) violation. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared with existing algorithm.

SummaryThis paper focus on providing a secure and trustworthy solution for virtual machine (VM) migration within an existing cloud provider domain, and/or to the other federating cloud providers. The infrastructure‐as‐a‐service (IaaS) cloud service model is mainly addressed to extend and complement the previous Trusted Computing techniques for secure VM launch and VM migration case. The VM migration solution proposed in this paper uses a Trust_Token based to guarantee that the user VMs can only be migrated and hosted on a trustworthy and/or compliant cloud platforms. The possibility to also check the compliance of the cloud platforms with the pre‐defined baseline configurations makes our solution compatible with an existing widely accepted standards‐based, security‐focused cloud frameworks like FedRAMP. Our proposed solution can be used for both inter‐ and intra‐cloud VM migrations. Different from previous schemes, our solution is not dependent on an active (on‐line) trusted third party; that is, the trusted third party only performs the platform certification and is not involved in the actual VM migration process. We use the Tamarin solver to realize a formal security analysis of the proposed migration protocol and show that our protocol is safe under the Dolev‐Yao intruder model. Finally, we show how our proposed mechanisms fulfill major security and trust requirements for secure VM migration in cloud environments.

In Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, users manage the systems in virtual machines (VMs) called user VMs through remote management systems (RMSes). To allow users to manage their VMs during failures inside the VMs, IaaS usually provides out-of-band remote management. This management is performed indirectly via an RMS server in a privileged VM called the management VM. However, it is discontinued when a user VM is migrated. This is because an RMS server in the management VM at the source host is terminated on VM migration. Even worse, pending data is lost between an RMS client and a user VM. In this paper, we propose D-MORE for continuing out-of-band remote management across VM migration. D-MORE provides a privileged and migratable VM called DomR and performs out-of-band remote management of a user VM via DomR. During VM migration, it synchronously co-migrates DomR and its target VM and transparently maintains the connections between an RMS client, DomR, and its target VM. We have implemented D-MORE in Xen and confirmed that a remote user could manage his VM via DomR after the VM has been migrated. Our experiments showed that input data was not lost during VM migration and the overhead of D-MORE was acceptable.

This paper addresses the problem of simultaneously migrating a group of co-located and virtual machines (VMs), i.e, VMs executing on the same physical machine. We refer to such a mass simultaneous migration of active VMs as live gang migration. Cluster administrators may often need to perform gang migration for load balancing, system maintenance, or power savings. Application performance requirements may dictate that the total migration time, network traffic overhead, and service downtime, be kept minimal when migrating multiple VMs. State-of-the-art migration techniques optimize the migration of a single VM. In this paper, we optimize the simultaneous migration of multiple co-located VMs. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a de-duplication based approach to perform concurrent migration of co-located VMs. Our approach transmits memory content that is identical across VMs only once during migration to significantly reduce both the total migration time and network traffic. Using the QEMU/KVM platform, we detail a proof-of-concept prototype implementation of two types of de-duplication strategies (at page level and sub-page level) and a differential compression approach to exploit content similarity across VMs. Evaluations over Gigabit Ethernet with various types of VM workloads demonstrate that our prototype for gang migration can achieve significant reductions in both network traffic and total migration time.