Migrating VM Quickly, Smartly, and Far Away

We are developing innovative virtualization technologies improving energy efficiency of data centers, manageability of big data, and dependability of cloud infrastructure. Our key technology is an advanced live migration mechanism that can migrate virtual machines quickly, smartly, and far away among distributed data centers.

The research topics cover:

Postcopy Live Migration with Guest-cooperative Page Faults

posted Apr 22, 2016, 1:22 AM by Takahiro Hirofuchi   [ updated Apr 22, 2016, 1:26 AM ]

Here is Part 2.

Postcopy live migration is a promising alternative of virtual machine (VM) migration, which transfers memory pages after switching the execution host of a VM. It allows a shorter and more deterministic migration time than precopy migration. In the Yabusame project, we developed postcopy migration for Qemu/KVM.

The following journal article presents a performance improvement technique of postcopy migration, extending the para-virtualized page fault mechanism of a virtual machine monitor.

Postcopy Live Migration with Guest-cooperative Page Faults,
Takahiro Hirofuchi, Isaku Yamahata, Satoshi Itoh,
IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, pp.2159-2167, Vol.E98-D, No.12, IEICE, Dec 2015
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2015PAP0011
PDF (Full Text)


Finally, the recent Qemu/KVM supports postcopy live migration. Congrats!

Simulation of Live Migration

posted Apr 22, 2016, 12:58 AM by Takahiro Hirofuchi

Let me introduce the recent publication from the project. Here is Part 1.

The outcome of the one-year stay in France is the virtual machine support of SimGrid. This stay was supported by a French research fund.

At the time of writing, SimGrid is the only simulation framework with an accurate precopy-based live migration model. It implements the precopy algorithm used in hypervisors. It can correctly simulate the duration of live migrations and the amount of transferred data, considering memory update speeds of VMs and resource contention of CPU and network.

The virtual machine support of SimGrid has been presented in the following articles. I recommend you to read and cite the latest IEEE Transaction article, which includes the contents of the prior conference papers.

Adding Virtual Machine Abstractions into SimGrid,
Takahiro Hirofuchi, Adrien Lèbre,
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing, pp.175-180, Sep 2013
DOI: 10.1109/CGC.2013.33

Adding a Live Migration Model into SimGrid,
Takahiro Hirofuchi, Adrien Lèbre, Laurent Pouilloux,
Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Services 2013 (CloudCom2013), pp.96-103, Dec 2013
DOI: 10.1109/CloudCom.2013.20

SimGrid VM: Virtual Machine Support for a Simulation Framework of Distributed Systems,
Takahiro Hirofuchi, Adrien Lèbre, Laurent Pouilloux,
IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 2015 (To appear)
DOI: 10.1109/TCC.2015.2481422
PDF (Full Text)


To accurately simulate the behavior of an IaaS cloud system, you will need to obtain the memory update intensity of your VMs. This information will be necessary and be one of the input parameters to your simulation program.

AIST released Qemu-DPT (Dirty Page Tracking). Qemu-DPT is a tool to measure the memory update speed of your VM. It is a small extension to Qemu/KVM. This tool itself was developed in the Yabusame project of AIST around 2012.

See instruction at the below github page for details.
https://github.com/grivon/yabusame-qemu-dpt

Visiting Nantes, France

posted Aug 30, 2013, 3:04 PM by Takahiro Hirofuchi   [ updated Aug 30, 2013, 3:07 PM ]

Since January 2013, Takahiro Hirofuchi is visiting ASCOLA Research Group of Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France. He is working together with Dr. Adrien Lebre, developing the virtual machine support of a famous and widely-used simulation framework (SimGrid).




At the moment of this writing, code is still under development. But, it's already started being used by other research projects. For enthusiasts (?),  it is publicly available in the hypervisor branch of the SimGrid repository.

AIST OpenLab 2012

posted Dec 27, 2012, 12:38 AM by Takahiro Hirofuchi

On Oct 25th and 26th, AIST had an openlab at the main research site. We presented our ongoing work regarding inter-cloud systems. A brochure in Japanese is available.

SC12 in Salt Lake City, Utah

posted Dec 27, 2012, 12:30 AM by Takahiro Hirofuchi   [ updated Dec 27, 2012, 12:40 AM ]

We went to SC12 held in Salt Lake City, Nov 10th-16th 2012 and presented the latest outcomes of our project. At the exhibition booth of AIST, there was a panel and live demo regarding "Yabusame Migration: Migrate VMs Quickly, Smartly, and Far Away, for Energy-saving in IT Infrastracture". We also presented two posters at the technical poster session.
  • Reducing the Migration Times of Multiple VMs on WANs ,
    Tae Seung Kang, Mauricio Tsugawa, Jose Fortes, Takahiro Hirofuchi ,
    IEEE Computer Society, SC12 ACM Student Research Competition Poster Session, Nov 2012

  • Virtual Machine Packing Algorithms for Lower Power Consumption,
    Satoshi Takahashi, Atsuko Takefusa, Maiko Shigeno, Hidemoto Nakada, Tomohiro Kudoh, Akiko Yoshise,
    IEEE Computer Society, SC12 Technical Poster Presentation, Nov 2012
Before SC12, Takahiro Hirofuchi stopped by University of Florida to have meetings and set up experiments for the joint research project regarding disaster recovery systems.

KVM Forum 2012 in Barcelona

posted Dec 27, 2012, 12:21 AM by Takahiro Hirofuchi

We presented the latest update of the Yabusame project in KVM Forum 2012, on Nov 7th in Barcelona, Spain. We talked about preliminary performance results and further development plans of post copy live migration for Qemu/KVM.
  • Yabusame Update on Postcopy Live Migration for QEMU/KVM,
    Isaku Yamahata, Takahiro Hirofuchi, KVM Forum 2012, Nov 2012
    slides

Cloud Computing 2012 in Nice

posted Sep 13, 2012, 12:39 AM by Takahiro Hirofuchi

A Ph.D student of University of Tokyo, working together with us, went to the third International Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDs, and Virtualization (CLOUD COMPUTING 2012), held in Nice, France, 22th-27th, June 2012, and gave a talk about a storage caching mechanism that strongly supports mobile computing based on live VM migration. This joint work explores a new frontier of cloud computing supported by advanced virtualization technologies. 

IEEE Cloud 2012 in Honolulu

posted Sep 13, 2012, 12:12 AM by Takahiro Hirofuchi   [ updated Sep 13, 2012, 12:15 AM ]

We presented our migration accelerator mechanism (MiyakoDori) in the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing (IEEE CLOUD 2012), held in Honolulu, Hawaii, 24th-29th June, 2012. This is a joint work with a Ph.D student of University of Tokyo.

ICC 2012 in Ottawa

posted Sep 12, 2012, 11:49 PM by Takahiro Hirofuchi   [ updated Sep 12, 2012, 11:54 PM ]

Takahiro Hirofuchi went to IEEE International Conference on Communications 2012, held in Ottawa, Canada, 10th-15th June 2012. He presented our international joint project with University of Florida that studies damage mitigation techniques of IT infrastructures under severe disasters.



LinuxCon Japan 2012

posted Sep 12, 2012, 11:37 PM by Takahiro Hirofuchi

We presented the latest development status of Postcopy Migration for Qemu/KVM (Yabusame) in LinuxCon Japan 2012, held in Yokohama, Japan, 6th-8th June 2012. Our slides and the latest information are available in our project page.

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