A decade modelling what migration actually costs
Doctorate in IT Systems Engineering at the Hasso-Plattner Institute under Professor Christoph Meinel. The thesis uses machine learning to model and predict the overhead of live migration: moving a running virtual machine from one server to another without switching it off.
- Copy while running. Memory is copied to the new server while the machine keeps working.
- Copy what changed. Pages written in the meantime are copied again, round after round.
- Pause and switch. A short pause copies the last pages, and the machine resumes on the new server.
Every round costs time, network traffic and, at the end, a pause. That overhead is what the research models and predicts.