Network-Aware VM Migration Heuristics for Improving the SLA Violation of Multi-Tier Web Applications in the Cloud

The virtualization technology enables multi-tier web application to be hosted in the Cloud. But the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is likely to be negatively affected when the network traffic is high as they may quickly overload the data center network and increase the response time of the system. Additionally, data centers experience high operational costs due to their considerable amount of energy consumption. The Virtual Machine (VM) technology and VM migration have been widely utilized to deal with such challenges. In this paper, we present design and implementation of an adaptive network-aware VM migration algorithm. The VM and target selection policies are based on the steady state network traffic in the system to minimize the negative effect of migration on other flows on the network. Moreover, we address the high energy consumption of the data center by employing an energy-aware VM placement algorithm. The effectiveness of our proposed VM migration algorithm is evaluated by extensive simulations in CloudSim using real workload traces. We compared two overloading detection policies in our experiments. The results show that our algorithm is able to improve the SLA violation (SLAV) and energy consumption up to 73% and 81%, respectively.