Early Notification and Dynamic Routing: An Improved SDN-Based Optimization Mechanism for VM Migration

Virtual Machine (VM) live migration is a crucial practice commonly applied in data centers, which can help users and enterprises manage network services more flexibly and economically. In general, large enterprises always require uninterrupted network service in VM migration, but the VM's own behavior and limited link resources often result in increased transmission times. We found that VMs may have two types of problems in live migration: bursty traffic and packet loss in the tail of the migration round, both of which tend to cause performance loss in the process of iterative migration. Thus, we propose an early notification (E-N) algorithm that can deal with these two problems. Simultaneously, considering more flexible software-defined networks, we put forward a dynamic routing (D-R) algorithm to ensure the link performance of VM live migration. Finally, we present experiments prove that VM migration performance can be improved by combining E-N algorithm and D-R algorithm.