Virtual machine migration techniques

Abstract

Techniques for migrating a virtual machine from a source computer system to a target computer system are disclosed. In an exemplary embodiment, a group of pages may be mapped as writable in response to determining that a guest operating system attempted to change a particular page. In the same or other embodiments, pages may be compressed prior to transmission so that the throughput of the communication channel may be maximized. In the same or other embodiments, a storage IO job can be canceled on the source computer system and reissued by the target computer system.

Description

Background technique [0001] Virtual machine migration is the process of moving a virtual machine from a source physical computer system to a target physical computer system with as little downtime as possible. The process of moving a virtual machine from one computer system to another does have an impact on the performance of the running guest operating system. For example, execution of the source virtual machine is slowed down while the memory used by the source virtual machine is being transferred to the target computer system. This is called the brownout period of the migration operation. Performance degradation occurs due to the fact that a tracking mechanism is required to track all modifications made to the virtual machine's memory by the running guest operating system. Tracking mechanisms typically use notifications that are raised each time the guest operating system writes to a guest physical page, and the handling of these notifications is what slows down execution...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Performance degradation due to the fact that a tracking mechanism is required to track all modifications made to the virtual machine's memory by the running guest operating system

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