MECOM: Live migration of virtual machines by adaptively compressing memory pages

Live migration of virtual machines has been a powerful tool to facilitate system maintenance, load balancing, fault tolerance, and power-saving, especially in clusters or data centers. Although pre-copy is extensively used to migrate memory data of virtual machines, it cannot provide quick migration with low network overhead but leads to large performance degradation of virtual machine services due to the great amount of transferred data during migration. To solve the problem, this paper presents the design and implementation of a novel memory-compression-based VM migration approach (MECOM for short) that uses memory compression to provide fast, stable virtual machine migration, while guaranteeing the virtual machine services to be slightly affected. Based on memory page characteristics, we design an adaptive zero-aware compression algorithm for balancing the performance and the cost of virtual machine migration. Using the proposed scheme pages are rapidly compressed in batches on the source and exactly recovered on the target. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with Xen, our system can significantly reduce downtime, total migration time, and total transferred data by 27.1%, 32%, and 68.8% respectively. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.