International Conference on Computing and Intelligence Systems

Pages: 1252 1256

Volume: 04, Special Issue: March 2015

ISSN: 2278-2397

Analyzing a Novel Approach for Virtual

Cluster Migration in Cloud Computing
T.Lavanya Suja1, V.Savithri2
1

MPhil Scholar, Dept.of.Computer Science, Mother Teresa Womens University, Kodaikanal, India
2
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, Womens Christian College, Chennai, India

Abstract-Virtual Cluster (VC) migration is

needed in Cloud Computing (CC) during situations
like load balancing, fault tolerance ,complying with
Service Level Agreement(SLA) etc. While
migrating VC from one Physical Machine(PM) to
another PM various constraints are considered for
an optimal solution. The proposed Backtracking
algorithm which has provided optimal solutions for
popular problems like N-Queens, Hamiltonian
cycle, selects a set of VMs in a VC to be migrated
on satisfying the criteria of the provider such as
minimum total migration time, little/minimum
down time better power management
and
increase in performance etc.
Keywords - Migration; clusters; VM; VC;
Backtracking; cloud computing
I. INTRODUCTION
The term Cloud Computing (CC)has wide spread
and has taken many dimensions in IT industry. Even
then we need a simple go through regarding its
definition and working. It can be defined simply as a
service which can be rented from internet on a pay per
use basic just like electricity, gas, water etc.The
services can be software,platform or an
infrastructure.Thus the famous three services of CC
are called as
Software-as-a-Service(SaaS)
Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS)
Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS)
The Iaas working goes like this. The provider rent
a machine(s) to the consumer based upon the request
given by the consumer after specifying clearly it in
Service Level Agreements(SLA).The consumer can
develop and build applications for his convenience on
that rented one(s). That machine is called a Virtual
Machine(VM) and a group of VMs are called Virtual
Cluster(VC) which resides in a Physical machine. PM
can be visualized as a group of powerful configuration
servers. During working or later at some point due to
necessities such as load balancing, fault tolerance and
complying with SLA the provider has to move VCs
from one PM to another PM. The advantage of VM is
that, the higher configuration server machine can be
able to run on a minimum configuration user machine
which is achieved via IaaS of cloud computing. The
concept of grouping one or more VMs into VC saves
time and gives more performance in VC migration.

International Journal of Computing Algorithm (IJCOA)

The rest of the paper is about IaaS and its working

alone. The scope of this paper is to survey the
techniques, approaches, algorithm used for migration
and to analyze their pro s and cons to bring out a new
approach for VC migration.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
Vikram Yadav, Pooja Malik and Ajay Singh
Chauhan suggest an optimization for VM which is
energy efficient by proposing a term Powernap.
Powernap is a useful state which saves more power as
only the system components which checks the job
arrivals will be active while CPU and DRAM are
inactive. Also they introduce a new component in the
proposed system called Power Consumption Tuner
node(PCTN) will be in sync with the controller node
of the Existing system which incorporates Ant colony
optimization for visiting all nodes in the cluster and
Bee hive optimization for Load balancing. They have
used past 3 years of data for Job arrival so as to use
the proposed system to avoid Wake delay and Nap
Delay by extending the previous job till the new job
is allocated [1]
Ajeena Beegom ,and M S Rajasree propose an
algorithm for VM provisioning and VM termination
on the basis of availability of resources. A centralized
approach in which the Load Prediction Module takes
the decision whether to create a new VM in an already
existing PM or to create a VM in a new PM by
consulting with the centralized controller module and
a Database on VM.Their algorithm employs greedy
method and claims it to be a cost optimal one with
running time O(nk).[2]
Another algorithm given by Harpreet Kaur and
Maninder Singhis a sequential one and her each user
requests are considered as a process. The processes
are assigned by comparing the memory requirements
of the process and the cloud. Process migration is
done from one cloud to another if it is not completed
within its deadline.[3] Sharmila S. Patil, and Priyanka
Pattenshetti propose 'Green Cloud Computing' by
offering 2 methods namely Static and Dynamic
architecture energy management. However both
methods achieve power saving at the cost of
performance degradation of 3%.[4]
As [5] introduces the concept of virtualization by
combining two nodes to form a 2-node cluster.When
any one of the node becomes faulty with no time and
without the knowledge of the user the other node

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comes into operation. The Heartbeat Apache is used to
configure 2-node cluster.Their results showed a
reliable,scalable and high performance situation due to
virtualization. Also it is client side compatible,cost
effective and little or no overhead .
Poral Nagaraja and S.Tejaswini.have used a 'Green
algorithm' which migrates VM or turn off PM by
comparing the resource usage with 'Hot Threshold'
and 'Cold Threshold'. Also they have introduced a
'skewness' concept to decrease the irregularity of VM
allocation so as to achieve Green Computing.
Simulation results using Cloud SIM shows that
overload avoidance mapping of virtual to physical
resources adaptively based on changing requirements
are achieved. [6] Comparison of two algorithms
namely 'Time-shared' and 'Space-shared' approached
on the 1000 cloudlets(tasks) and inference that on the
basis of Task Profit the Space-shared one outdid the
Time shared approach by completing 97% of the tasks
before deadline. Although there is only marginal
difference in the output on Task Profit,when the
parameters such as Throughput,Task Penalty and Net
Gain are considered the Space-shared approach
outweighs the Time-shared approach. It is very
interesting to know the result that space shared is the
better approach for tasks scheduling in cloud
environment.[7]
A study was conducted to run the two codes of NQueens problem and Towers of Hanoi in different
Virtual machines. Their individual execution time (in
seconds) is measured and compared. Out of the 3
VMs RedHat Linux VM gave the least execution time.
This paper serve as an introduction for Virtualization
concept and comparison of their characteristics which
is very primary notion in cloud computing. This
knowledge can be applied in larger scale real time
situations in CC so as to select VMs on the basis of
specific performance criteria. [8]
Discussion about the working of various
algorithms that are used for soft computing and
analyze the fact which one can be best suitable of
Load Balancing in cloud computing. The load
balancing can be CPU ,Memory, Performance,Delay
etc. Among the 8 algorithms analyzed Active
clustering and Ant colony are potential candidates for
cloud computing.[9]
Supreet Kaur Sahi et al. analyze the already
existing resource prediction models and try to find out
a better approach for resource prediction which can be
well suited for E-business applications. They have
also provided the statistics that every 100ms delay in
Amazon costs a reduction of 1% sales. Another data,
points out that a 43 billion dollar loss was faced due to
bad performance of the e-commerce websites
[10].This proves the fact that Delay time or Down
time is a crucial factor in designing algorithms for
VC migration and it should be very little if needed.
In [11] the authors introduce the concept of
Virtual Cluster(VC) which is a group of VMs in a
PM.Homogenous and Heterogeneous VC migration

International Journal of Computing Algorithm (IJCOA)

Volume: 04, Special Issue: March 2015

ISSN: 2278-2397

are performed in a simulated environment using

Sequential,Concurrent,
Mutual
migration
techniques.The results are very useful and interesting
to device any algorithm in future. They suggest that if
there is a master and slave VC then slave VC should
be given high priority for migration. Also their
findings that the first VC that was migrated gave
better performance than the later migrated VCs.
Andreas Berl et al.find prospect of energy efficiency
in cloud computing by bringing out the necessity of it.
Heating caused by IT industry leads to negative
impact of Green House Gases (GHG) by excessive
Co2 emission. Thus the authors bring out the need of
"Smartness" in "Computing" by being "energy
efficient". Virtualization is a potential technology
which saves energy for cloud computing. VMs can be
migrated from one PM to another PM so as to reduce
the heat generated by more PMs.Some PMs can be
switched off if there is no VM running on it. The
suggestions
such as
as Full and Para
Virtualization,Dynamic Resource Provisioning are
implemented
for
energy
efficient
cloud
computing.[12]
Another paper discusses the VM live migration
while maintain transparency in the application,o.s and
remote client level.Their results show that the VM
experiences a down time of only less than a second
which provides transparency to the user.The total
migration time can be controlled by properly
managing the CPU resources. This method of using
VMWare differs from a previous study by Hansen and
Jul as it migrates a VM unmodified whereas their
method needs some modification in the guest o.s.[13]
Anton Belaglosav and Rajkumar Buyya portrays
that their algorithm, is suited for generic cloud
environment, ly to adheres strictly to SLAs and gives
better performance. Their simulation results showed
that it is possible to device an algorithm on 3
constraints such as resources,energy and thermal
optimization which achieves a better performance for
a generic cloud environment with dynamic
workloads.[14] Cloudsim can be effectively used as
simulation toolkit for studying,analyzing,simulating
the behaviours of cloud systems. As the cloud
architecture is enormous and time,cost consuming for
implementation before knowing the results, this
toolkit serve as a helpful alternative for researchers.
The authors have done case studies of different
scenarios like, scalability and overhead evaluation for
federated and non-federated clouds where federation
clouds did well, computed the makespan of hybrid
cloud strategy where public cloud inclusion gave good
cost returns,the last case study was related to energy
conscious management of datacenter which revealed
in order to save energy some VMs are migrated that
caused an average of 70% SLA violations which
needs to be improved.[15] The results give us a
caution that SLA violations should not be occurring
as a result of VM migrations. A new algorithm for
Load Balancing includes two factors, Load and Time

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as the criteria. As per the algorithm when the load of a
Data center goes above a Threshold value then its load
will be transferred to any other data center which is 5
and 1/2 hours geographically apart from it. The
approach is considered feasible as the time zone
changes; the latter data center will have fewer loads
than the former. [16] This provides an option for
selecting PMs for migration.
The leasing concept in cloud using 'Haizea' as
backend in OpenNebula. There are 3 approaches
available
in
it
namely
Advance
Reservation,Immediate and Best Effort of which the
first two are given higher priority than the third
one.[17]
Various techniques such as having a Monitoring
Agent,Threshold
Value,assigning
priority,using
Global
Polls,social
cloud,Queue
based
model,Simulated Annealing model,Energy conserving
model and uncertainty game theory as the logic for
Resource allocation algorithms. The paper concludes
with a remark that cloud will be the 5th utility such as
water,electricity etc, so it is a must to manage its
resources to maximize the profit of provider and
minimize the cost of the consumer. [18]
The data leakage problem in cloud computing is
discussed as data is an important asset that has to be
secured always. Semantic Clustering technique is
applied for data thereby anomalies are detected and
threats are found out followed by database updation
leading to its security.[19]
Comparison of the solutions provided by
Backtracking and Genetic algorithms for the NQueens problem. The author concludes with the fact
after several iterations performed on both of them,that
Genetic algorithm provide simpler solution but the
execution time of Backtracking algorithm is very less
than the former so the efficiency of backtracking is
proved.[20]
A methodology is suggested where a unique
solution for N-Queen problem is obtained. There are
two types of solutions for a problem. Theyare Unique
and Distinct. In that case there are a total of 92
solutions out of which only 12 are different solutions .
The authors bring out 3 rules in order to find a unique
solution.Their unique solution holds for all values
n>4. [21] Somaeyh Soltan Bagshahi et al.propose
Greedy Algorithm for VC migration.The only
criterion taken was the size of the VM, PM and no
other constraints are considered.Their approach of
taking a Virtual cluster as a combination of several
VMs is useful and will save sometime. Their
simulation results proved that Greedy Algorithm gave
better performance than the serial method.[22]
A survey of various live migration techniques and
does a comparative study on them.They try to analyze
the algorithms of live migration ,find out that all of
them attempt to reduce down time and increase the
performance than before.The authors find out that PreCopy approach interesting and live VM migration for
Cloud Federation to be promising in the future.As a

International Journal of Computing Algorithm (IJCOA)

Volume: 04, Special Issue: March 2015

ISSN: 2278-2397

result we get to know what are the various criteria on

which approach should be proposed such as power
management,proactive maintenance and Load
balancing etc.[23]
Pallavi Gupta et al.propose a power-efficient VM
migration. Their approach consolidates the VMs so as
to be energy saving.The output of the method achieves
mapping of several VMs to fewer PMs and switching
off the underutilized or idle PM there by saving
energy and produces less heat by leaving the
minimum carbon foot print.Their achievement in
power saving results contribute to Green computing as
well.[24]. Gulshan Soni and Mala Kalra introduce the
dimension of security in Live VM migration.They
point out the fact where there are some situations in
which the security of VMs (source and destination)
and hypervisor can be at risk by intruders and
malfunctioning. The facts like Data confidentiality,
Data Integrity and Privacy comes into picture during
security breach.They analyze few solutions such as
Hash code,security to system calls between
Hypervisor and guest o.s etc.Since the data transferred
between VMs are plain text and they go through a
network, security is also a mandatory factor to be
considered.[25]
In [26] theauthors survey the cloud computing
providers and tabulate their services and turnovers.
Also some important research groups and their works
are tabulated .A study on the impact of cloud
computing revealed that 54% of CIOs have evaluated
cloud computing and 46% of CIOs have yet to cloud
computing. The authors suggest that the cloud
migration can be supported by a Cloud Adoption
ToolKit which helps in the analysis of decision.
Pradip et al. justify the fact that live migration is very
essential in VM migration. Two categories of it are
Pre-copy and Post-copy are analyzed and comes
out with the fact the pre-copy is the most suitable one
for live VM migration. The authors surveyed 7
research papers for VM migration and formulated 6
Performance Metrics such as Preparation time, Down
time, Pages transferred, Resume time, Total migration
n time and Application degradation. Lastly they
include security is also an important factor in VM
migration.[27].A case study details the portability
between Eucalyptus and Open Stack. The inference
got from the case study was that portability between
different cloud providers. Also it will attract more
users to shift into cloud computing. Standardization is
the need of the hour which the author tries to bring out
in this paper.[28] Risk Homeostasis Methodology
where in which a model is used to analyze the cloud
computing alternative for the underlying business
system.This model first assesses the risk and analyzes
thebenefits. Then a migration strategy is
designed.Next step is to migrate and manage by
Change management.The last step is evaluation by
doing
Business
Impact
and
Stakeholder
evaluation.[29] A case study conducted by Ali Khajeh
et al. reveals when migrating on-premises applications

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to cloud data center the organization has to undergo a
transition phase which will be revealing the positive of
the cloud while sacrificing the well accustomed usage
of Legacy applications even though they enjoy
benefits of migration and
propose a method
whichmitigates it for any type of organization that
likes to adopt cloud computing.[30]
III. FINDINGS
After analyzing 30 research papers we are able to
find out the fact that there is a need for an effective
algorithm which accomplishes live migration without
compromising SLA agreements. One of the authors
[22] proposes some famous algorithm like greedy
approach aiming for optimal solution. This gave us an
idea that Backtracking can be a potential candidate
for VC migration algorithm. Backtracking is a popular
algorithm formulated by B.H.Lehmer in 1952. By
correlating backtracking with VC migration the
method proposed can be given as
1. Aim
Migrate VCs from one PM to another PM based
upon the constraints.
2. Explicit Constraints
Select VMs from the same VCs
3. Implicit Constraints
4. Memory size of VM and PM
Minimum down time
Increase in performance after migration
5. Pseudocode
Procedure VC_Migration( )
Begin
vclist, pmlist arranged in descending order;
VMs arranged in ascending order of downtime;
For each PM in pmlist do
While sizeof(PM) > 0 do
For each VC in vclist do
If sizeof(VC)> sizeof(PM) then continue;
For each VM in VC do
sizeof(PM) = sizeof(PM) sizeof(VM)
End for
VC is in migration to PM
End for
End while
End for
End
IV. CONCLUSIONAND FUTURE SCOPE
Conducting a wide survey about VC migration and
its techniques, we have found out that there is a need
for better algorithms for VC migration which achieves
energy efficiency. This will attract more avenues of
applications for CC and also pave way for Green
Computing. The analysis of various algorithms proved
the fact that the proposed one can be better than the
existing ones. Though in paper [22] the authors
introduced a new technique called GreedyMethod

International Journal of Computing Algorithm (IJCOA)

Volume: 04, Special Issue: March 2015

ISSN: 2278-2397

and proved it to be better than the Serial Method,it

failed to include several important constraints like
minimum downtime,better performance etc. Apopular
algorithm Backtracking[31] was found as a
potential candidate for this and a rough pseudo code is
developed.In contrary to the Greedy Method this
algorithm incorporates constraints like minimum
downtime,selecting VMs from same VCs, hence
better performance will be achieved than the former
methods like Serial and Greedy approaches.
Future work includes fine tuning the code for the
algorithm to include more implicit constraints and
studying the results. We propose to do this by
CloudSimsimulation software and come up with the
simulation results in future.
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