Evaluating live virtual machine migration overhead on client's application perspective

A key feature on virtualization technology is live migration. Through live migration, it is possible to exchange virtual server hosts between physical machines without stopping its services and with low downtime during migration. However, virtualization also has some drawbacks, for instance, the overhead generated from the virtualization layer. Many research evaluated overhead effect in different scenarios, but few investigated overheads in the migration process, on client's side. Our research evaluated live migration process overhead, on real and virtual environments, noticed from the client side regarding two different services: web server and database. YCSB and ab Benchmark were adopted as workloads for those services. In the findings, based on our experimental setting, we could observe that almost all tests on real environment overcame those on virtual, with both benchmarks. The impact of the live migration in the services was evident, proving to be more effective in real machines than on virtual machines. We found the DB service accommodated better to the virtual environment and to migration then Web service.