Candidate
Bethany Allison McCollum
Title
Optimization of the Migration of Virtual Machines over a Bipartite Mesh Network Topology
Supervisor
Gordon Agnew
Abstract
In today's society, the core network is becoming increasingly important to provide support for the ever growing number of end users as well as the applications that are required to run. While network technology continues to evolve, new topologies are formed to help optimize traffic and communication. One such topology is a bipartite mesh topology, a partial mesh which allows for a two hop distance for any source-destination pair with normal operation. Another trend that requires a good back end network is the act of virtualization, or creating virtual machines to run on configured hosts. One of the key aspects of the virtualization technology is the migration of virtual machines, moving them from one host to another via the network to increase performance or ease resource usage. Migration is a complicated procedure which has to be done quickly to avoid down time, so seeking ways to decrease this time of transfer is important. In today's environments, migration is only done by considering the hosts that it can move to and does not take the network into account. A way to help optimize the migration of virtual machines, especially over a bipartite mesh network, is to take the network state into account and to help minimize the congestion and the traffic on the network created by the migration. There are various options for taking the network state into account and these are explored, demonstrating how they optimize the movement of virtual machines from the perspective of both the hypervisor and the network.