Autonomous learning for efficient resource utilization of dynamic VM migration

Dynamic migration of virtual machines on a cluster of physical machines is designed to maximize resource utilization by balancing loads across the cluster. When the utilization of a physical machine is beyond a fixed threshold, the machine is deemed overloaded. A virtual machine is then selected within the overloaded physical machine for migration to a lightly loaded physical machine. Key to such threshold-based VM migration is to determine when to move which VM to what physical machine, since wrong or inadequate decisions can cause unnecessary migrations that would adversely affect the overall performance. We present in this paper a learning framework that autonomously finds and adjusts thresholds at runtime for different computing requirements. Central to our approach is the previous history of migrations and their effects before and after each migration in terms of standard deviation of utilization. We set up an experimental environment that consists of extensive real world benchmarking problems and a cluster of 16 physical machines each of which has on average eight virtual machines. We demonstrate through experimental results that our approach autonomously finds thresholds close to the optimal ones for different computing scenarios and that such varying thresholds yield an optimal number of VM migrations for maximizing resource utilization.