An Architecture for the Management of Virtual Machine Migrations

Virtual Machine (VM) migrations became a defacto technology adopted in the management of cloud resources. However, the expansion (in number and complexity) of cloud Datacenters (DCs) requires management capabilities specifically dedicated to migrations. In fact, the increasing number of resource remappings is hardly managed by the Cloud Management Systems (CMS) that usually handle migrations as a stage of the VM life cycle. As a consequence, migrations are potentially planned based on outdated or missing information. In addition, VM migrations are usually under the control of a human, increasing the likelihood of fails and delays. This work proposes an architecture and an approach to automate the management of VM migrations. Our proposal was compared with a solution not based on management premises, both considering interDC migration scenarios. The evaluation shows the effectiveness of the management approach, confirming that the number of unnecessary migrations decreases, and hot spots are less frequent.