Exploiting Data Deduplication to Accelerate Live Virtual Machine Migration

As one of the key characteristics of virtualization, live virtual machine (VM) migration provides great benefits for load balancing, power management, fault tolerance and other system maintenance issues in modern clusters and data centers. Although Pre-Copy is a widespread used migration algorithm, it does transfer a lot of duplicated memory image data from source to destination, which results in longer migration time and downtime. This paper proposes a novel VM migration approach, named Migration with Data Deduplication (MDD), which introduces data deduplication into migration. MDD utilizes the self-similarity of run-time memory image, uses hash based fingerprints to find identical and similar memory pages, and employs Run Length Encode (RLE) to eliminate redundant memory data during migration. Experiment demonstrates that compared with Xen's default Pre-Copy migration algorithm, MDD can reduce 56.60% of total data transferred during migration, 34.93% of total migration time, and 26.16% of downtime on average.