An Autonomous Network Aware VM Migration Strategy in Cloud Data Centres
Live virtual machine migration can have a major impact on how a cloud system performs, as it can consume significant amounts of network resources such as bandwidth. A virtual machine migration occurs when a host becomes over utilised or under utilised. Migration contributes to an increase in consumption of network resources which leads to longer migration times and ultimately has a detrimental effect on the performance of a cloud system. In this paper, we propose an autonomous network aware virtual machine migration strategy that observes the current demand level of a network and performs appropriate actions based on what it is experiencing. The Artificial Intelligence technique known as Reinforcement Learning acts as a decision support system, enabling an agent to learn an optimal time to schedule a virtual machine migration depending on the current network traffic demand. We show that an autonomous agent can learn to utilise available network resources when network saturation occurs at peak times.
2016 International Conference on Cloud and Autonomic Computing (ICCAC)