2008-08-15 2PM-3PM, EB G11: Michael Hines on "Post-Copy Based Live Virtual Machine Migration Using Pre-Paging And Dynamic Self-Ballooning"

Michael Hines will be talking about his latest research in a department colloquium. While this isn't an "official" grad seminar talk, everyone is certainly invited to attend. Here's the abstract:


Time: Friday, August 15th, 2008 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: G-11 Conference Room Engineering Bldg.

Title: "Post-Copy Based Live Virtual Machine Migration Using
Pre-Paging And Dynamic Self-Ballooning"

ABSTRACT

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of the post-copy
based method for the live migration of virtual machines across a
Gigabit LAN. Live migration is a mandatory feature of modern
hypervisors today. It facilitates server consolidation, system
maintenance, and lower power consumption. Post-copy refers to the
deferral of the ``copy" phase of live migration until the virtual
machine's CPU state
has already been migrated. This enables the migration daemon to try
different methods by which to perform the memory copy. With
post-copy, we seek the goal of a ``win-win'' by deterministically
guaranteeing at most the same migration time of the static, pure
stop-and-copy method. Post-copy also provides the downtime and
liveness benefits of pre-copy, without relying on an unbounded
iterative process. We facilitate the use of post-copy with a specific
instance of adaptive pre-paging (also known as adaptive remote
paging). Pre-paging is capable of eliminating all duplicate page
transmissions and removing any residual dependencies. Our algorithm is
able to minimize the number of page faults to less than 20% of the
Virtual Machine's writable working set. Finally, we facilitate both
the original pre-copy and post-copy schemes with the use of dynamic,
periodic self-ballooning. This prevents the migration daemon from
transmitting unnecessary free pages in the guest system. This also
noticeably speeds up both migration schemes with very negligible CPU
degradation to the processes running within the Virtual Machine. We
implement post-copy on top of the Xen Hypervisor and benchmark its
behavior against the existing pre-copy method.

For more information please visit:
http://osnet.cs.binghamton.edu/publications/TR-20080702.pdf