Opportunistic live migration of virtual machines

Summary Live migrations of virtual machines are required in cloud data centers in various contexts such as evacuating a host machine for maintenance, balancing the workloads on host machines, optimizing physical resource utilization, and meeting the custom demands of the user applications. Virtual machine migrations can, however, be costly in terms of both resources consumed for the migration as well as in terms of service level agreement (SLA) violations during the migration window. The cost is determined by many factors and they, in turn, are impacted by WHEN the migration happens during the lifetime of the virtual machine. Empirical studies show that if we have a window in which the migration is to be done (proactive rather than reactive where no such window exists), we can do it by carefully choosing the starting point within the window so that the SLA violation is minimum. In this paper, we propose a model to migrate virtual machines opportunistically to minimize the SLA violations. The idea is to find the time instants, called opportunities, at which, if the migration starts, the number and extent of SLA violations are minimal. Our experiments show that the migrations time savings with opportunistic migrations are up to 25%.