Cost-Aware Live Migration of Services in the Cloud

Live migration of virtual machines is an important component of the emerging cloud computing paradigm. While live migration provides extreme versatility of management, it comes at a price of degraded service performance during migration. The bulk of studies devoted to live migration of virtual machines focus on the duration of the copy phase as a primary metric of migration performance. While shorter down times are clearly desirable, the precopy phase imposes an overhead on the infrastructure that may result in severe performance degradation of the migrated and collocated services offsetting the benefits accrued through live migration.