A Container-Based Technique to Improve Virtual Machine Migration in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Hypervisor-enabled virtualization is a promising technology to deploy applications and implement Virtual Machine (VM) migration on cloud data centers. However, one critical aspect in hypervisor-based solution is that to deploy applications each VM is installed with a dedicated guest OS along with the requirement of binaries and library files and substantially large VM's image size. Therefore, it is a significant concern for data center administrators because it causes performance overheads. To solve these issues, a new paradigm of virtualization technology that has attracted considerable attention is containerization. Although, progress has been made to address container-based virtualization, there has been less attention to explore the issue of performance evaluation of container and VM in a migration environment. The main contribution of this research study is to develop an experimental setup to implement and evaluate the performance of LXD/CR container-based migration technique and compared it with the pre-copy VM migration scheme. To conduct this performance evaluation, first we modified Linux kernel and implemented LXD which uses liblxc to launch container, then migration of the running container is facilitated using a checkpoint/restore mechanism of CRIU technique. To ensure the applicability and validity for real-time cloud infrastructure, we executed a wide variety of benchmarks such as web server, CPU-intensive, disk I/O and database. From the results obtained, it is found that compared to pre-copy VM migration scheme, LXD/CR container migration technique reduces the downtime, migration time, amount of data transferred and the number of pages transferred by 75.66%, 65.55%, 76.63%, and 76.78%, respectively. In addition, the migration overhead caused is reduced by 55.89% w.r.t. CPU utilization and 76.52% w.r.t. RAM utilization. This being an important contribution for migrating the running applications efficiently and consequently increase the business value of the cloud infrastructure providers.

Keywords:

• Cloud computing
• KVM
• Linux container
• Migration
• Pre-copy
• Virtualization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aditya Bhardwaj

Aditya Bhardwaj is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research (NITTTR), which is funded by Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), the Government of India, and affiliated to Panjab University, Chandigarh. He received his BTech in CSE from GBTU University, Lucknow, and ME (Master of Engineering) in CSE from NITTTR, Chandigarh. He has more than 2 years of teaching experience and participated in a number of national, international conferences. His research areas focus on cloud computing virtualization, containerization, data center networking, big-data and software defined networking (SDN). He has published more than nine research papers in different national and international conferences, six papers in international journals and recently one paper in Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, SCI-E journal. Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

C. Rama Krishna

C Rama Krishna received his BTech from JNTU, Hyderabad; MTech from Cochin University of Science & Technology, Cochin, and PhD from IIT, Kharagpur. He is Senior Member, IEEE, USA. Since 1996, he is working with Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research (NITTTR), Chandigarh, and currently holding the position of Professor & Head. His areas of research interest include computer networks, wireless networks, cryptography & cyber security, and cloud computing. To his credit, he has more than 80 research publications in referred international and national journals and conferences. He acted as associate editor for International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society. He is a member of Advisory/Technical committees for many national and international journals and conferences and also chaired many technical sessions. He is a reviewer of various journals for the IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, and Springer publishers. He has more than 22 years of experience in organizing more than 100 training programs in the upcoming areas of CSE and IT for the faculty of engineering colleges, polytechnics and industry professionals. He is an expert member of National Board of Accreditation (NBA) for CSE and IT disciplines and NIRF, Govt of India. He has taken various initiatives at NITTTR Chandigarh towards paperless office under “GO GREEN” initiative. Email: [email protected]