Experimental Study of Virtual Machine Migration in Support of Reservation of Cluster Resources

Virtual Machines are becoming increasingly valuable to resource consolidation and management, providing efficient and secure resource containers, along with desired application execution environments. This paper focuses on the VM-based resource reservation problem, that is, the reservations of CPU, memory and network resources for individual VM instances, as well as for VM clusters. In particular, it considers the scenario where one or several physical servers need to be vacated to start a cluster of VMs for dedicated execution of parallel jobs. VMs provide a primitive for transparently vacating workloads through migration; however, the process of migrating several VMs can be time-consuming and needs to be estimated.