Improved Virtual Machine Migration Approaches in Cloud Environment

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.

Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation provides a promising approach to save energy and improve resource utilization in cloud data centers. However, aggressive consolidation of VMs may lead to performance degradation of data centers and even Service Level Agreement (SLA) violation. Therefore, it is very important to solve the tradeoff between reduction of SLA violation level and energy costs. In this paper, we propose a Host State 3-order Markov Chain prediction model for SLA-aware and energy efficient consolidation of VMs in cloud data centers. We propose two adaptive utilization thresholds based on a robust statistical method for host state estimate, and our model uses them to build a 3-order Markov Chain Transition Matrix manually for host state detection. We implement our algorithms on Cloudsim simulator for comparative study. The experimental results show that our model can significantly reduce SLA violation rates while keeping energy cost efficient, it can reduce the metric of SLA Violation by at most 98.69% and the metric of Energy by at most 21.88% for real world workload.

Cloud computing providers have to deal with the energy-performance trade-off: minimizing energy consumption, while meeting service level agreement (SLA) requirements. This paper proposes a new heuristic approach for the dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) in cloud data centers. The fast best-fit decreasing (FBFD) algorithm for intelligent VMs allocating into hosts and dynamic utilization rate (DUR) algorithm for utilization space and VM migration are successfully proposed. We performed simulations using PlanetLab and GWDG data center workloads to compare our approach against the existing models. It has been observed that the FBFD heuristic algorithm produces better results compared to modified BFD algorithm in terms of energy consumption and SLA violation. Additionally, the time complexity of FBFD algorithm is significantly improved from the order of O(\(m\,*\,n\)) to O(\(m\,*\,\log _2{n}\)). Furthermore, leaving some rates of capacity in the physical machines by the proposed DUR algorithm for VMs to be extended reduces the number of migrations which in turn improves the energy consumption and SLA violation. Our heuristic approach is evaluated using CloudSim and the results show that it performs better than the current state-of-the-art approaches.

The article examines the importance of container migration within the context of container placement tasks in cloud data centers. Cloud computing offers organizations significant benefits such as flexibility, scalability, and reduced costs for equipment, energy, and maintenance. Cloud providers face the challenge of not only efficiently placing containers initially but also dynamically reallocating them, along with virtual machines, in response to changing demands and workloads. This necessitates the development and application of migration algorithms. The study analyzes how migration is a critical component for ensuring optimal resource use, maintaining high service availability, and reducing service level agreement (SLA) violations. The research aims to enhance the productivity of cloud data centers in the task of container placement by utilizing container mi-gration algorithms. This objective is driven by the need for cloud providers to use their resources effectively to provide higher quality service and maintain competitive pricing. The use of migrations prevents overloading or underloading of servers and virtual machines, which is especially impor-tant in the highly dynamic environment of cloud computing. The research developed a hybrid mi-gration algorithm that includes the migration of both containers and virtual machines. Mathemati-cal aspects of the container placement task are described, and the migration algorithm is detailed. Experiments showed that implementing this algorithm reduces operational costs by 24% compared to traditional methods that do not use migration, and by 9% compared to less flexible migration strategies. There was also a demonstrated reduction in SLA violation times by 40%, indicating im-provements in service quality and reliability of cloud services. The conclusions of this study confirm that container and virtual machine migration is necessary for effective management of dynamic re-sources in cloud data centers in the context of container placement tasks.

Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is an effective way to improve resource utilization and reduce energy consumption in cloud data centers. Most existing studies have considered VM consolidation as a bin-packing problem, but the current schemes commonly ignore the long-term relationship between VMs and hosts. In addition, there is a lack of long-term consideration for resource optimization in the VM consolidation, which results in unnecessary VM migration and increased energy consumption. To address these limitations, a VM consolidation method based on multi-step prediction and affinity-aware technique for energy-efficient cloud data centers (MPaAFVMC) is proposed. The proposed method uses an improved linear regression prediction algorithm to predict the next-moment resource utilization of hosts and VMs, and obtains the stage demand of resources in the future period through multi-step prediction, which is realized by iterative prediction. Then, based on the multi-step prediction, an affinity model between the VM and host is designed using the first-order correlation coefficient and Euclidean distance. During the VM consolidation, the affinity value is used to select the migration VM and placement host. The proposed method is compared with the existing consolidation algorithms on the PlanetLab and Google cluster real workload data using the CloudSim simulation platform. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve significant improvement in reducing energy consumption, VM migration costs, and service level agreement (SLA) violations.

Cloud computing provides utility oriented services and pay-as-you-go computing model for its users. Massive adoption of Cloud services leads to build a sustainable environment and also demands for green Cloud services. With the advancement in Cloud services, the issue of carbon dioxide emission becomes significant. There is also a challenge for Cloud provider to satisfy the customer by guaranteeing the services with performance and availability in Service Level Agreement (SLA). Hence, energy consumption and SLA violation become important issues for Cloud providers. These issues can be addressed in many facets viz. efficient provisioning of resources, reducing energy consumption in datacenters, server consolidation, virtual machine (VM) migration, minimizing SLA violation or also by providing SLA with green requirements. In this paper, we survey various techniques which address green SLA with Quality of Service (QoS) requirements by using different resource management and consolidation procedures. Further, we propose our work by considering the multi-criteria method for resource management which selects the host as probable migration destination having highest predicted utilization after allocating a VM on the host. Hence, we aim to address the issue of maintaining the trade-off between energy consumption and SLA violation.

Cloud data centers present a challenge to environmental sustainability because of their significant energy consumption. Additionally, performance degradation resulting from energy management solutions, such as virtual machine (VM) consolidation, impacts service level agreements (SLAs) between cloud service providers and users. Thus, to achieve a balance between efficient energy consumption and avoiding SLA violations, we propose a novel VM consolidation algorithm. Conventional algorithms result in unnecessary migrations when improperly selecting VMs. Therefore, our proposed E2SVM algorithm addresses this issue by selecting VMs with high load fluctuations and minimal resource usage from overloaded servers. These selected VMs are then placed on normally loaded servers, considering their stability index. Moreover, our approach prevents server underutilization by either applying all or no VM migrations. Simulation results demonstrate a 12.9% decrease in maximum energy consumption compared with the minimum migration time VM selection policy. In addition, a 47% reduction in SLA violations was observed when using the medium absolute deviation as the overload detection policy. Therefore, this approach holds promise for real-world data centers because it minimizes energy waste and maintains low SLA violations.

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

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.

Dynamic Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation is a successful approach to improve the energy efficiency and the resource utilization in cloud environments. Consequently, optimizing the online energy-performance tradeoff directly influences quality of service. In this study, algorithms named as CPU Priority based Best-Fit Decreasing (CPBFD) and Dynamic CPU Priority based Best-Fit Decreasing (DCPBFD) are proposed for VM placement. A number of VM placement algorithms are implemented and compared with the proposed algorithms. The algorithms are evaluated through simulations with real-world workload traces and it is shown that the proposed algorithms outperform the known algorithms. The simulation results clearly show that CPBFD and DCPBFD provide the least service level agreement violations, least VM migrations, and efficient energy consumption.

The virtual machine (VM) provisioning in cloud computing offers a good possibility for energy and cost saving, given the dynamic nature of the cloud environment. However, the commitment of giving the best possible quality of service to end users often leads to the requirement in dealing with the energy and performance tradeoff. In this work, we have proposed and evaluated three different virtual machine selection policies (MedMT, MaxUT and HP) to achieve a better performance as compared with the existing state of art algorithms. The proposed policies are evaluated through simulation on large-scale workload data conducted over a period of 7 days in a series of experiments. The results clearly indicate how the virtual machine selection algorithms can improve upon the energy consumption by data centers as well as the overall reduction in service level agreements (SLAs), thus reducing the cost significantly.

The article presents an efficient energy optimization framework based on dynamic resource scheduling for VM migration in cloud data centers. This increasing number of cloud data centers all over the world are consuming a vast amount of power and thus, exhaling a huge amount of CO2 that has a strong negative impact on the environment. Therefore, implementing Green cloud computing by efficient power reduction is a momentous research area. Live Virtual Machine (VM) migration, and server consolidation technology along with appropriate resource allocation of users' tasks, is particularly useful for reducing power consumption in cloud data centers. In this article, the authors propose algorithms which mainly consider live VM migration techniques for power reduction named “Power_reduction” and “VM_migration.” Moreover, the authors implement dynamic scheduling of servers based on sequential search, random search, and a maximum fairness search for convenient allocation and higher utilization of resources. The authors perform simulation work using CloudSim and the Cloudera simulator to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. Results show that the proposed approaches achieve around 30% energy savings than the existing algorithms.

Cloud computing is a utility where compute resources are accessed on pay-per-use ground. It is enacted through virtualizationwhich is a central technology in cloud computing. Virtualization provides a secure and commendable environment for the functioning of cloud applications. Virtual machine (VM) plays a crucial role in the cloud data center when a host machine is exhausted due to tremendous network traffic, then the load is stabilized by shifting highly loaded VM to the under-utilized host machine. This review article recapitulates energy-efficient VM migration, VM migration techniques, objectives and issues related to it. The existing Swarm intelligence based VMmigration techniques are conferred and compared.

Cloud computing is a new computation technology that provides services to consumers and businesses. The main idea of Cloud computing is to present software and hardware services through the Internet to the users and organizations at all levels. In Cloud computing, the users pay for the services, which means a usage-based payment system is used in this technology. Using virtualization technology in computation resources enables the appropriate utilization of resources in cloud computing. One of the most significant challenging issues in virtualization technology is the placement of optimal virtual machines on physical machines in cloud data centers. The placement of virtual machines comprises a process wherein virtual machines are mapped onto physical machines in cloud data centers. Optimal deployment leads to the reduction in power consumption, optimal use of resources, traffic reduction in data centers, costs reduction, and efficiency enhancement of the data center in the cloud. The present article proposed a new approach using a combination of the Sine–Cosine Algorithm and Salp Swarm Algorithm as discrete multi-objective and chaotic functions for optimal virtual machine placement. The first goal of the proposed algorithm was to reduce the power consumption in cloud data centers by condensing the number of active physical machines. The second goal was to reduce the waste of resources and manage it by optimally virtual machine placement on physical machines in cloud data centers. The third objective was to minimize and reduce Service Level Agreement among the active physical machines in cloud data centers. The proposed method prevent the increase in the migration of virtual machines onto physical machines. Ultimately, the results obtained from the proposed algorithm were compared with those of previous akin algorithms in the literature, including First Fit, Virtual Machine Placement Ant Colony System, and Modified Best Fit Decreasing. The proposed scheme is tested using Amazon EC2 Instances and the result indicated that the proposed algorithm performs better than the existing algorithms for various performance metrics.

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.