Memory Management and Reuse Mechanism for Virtual Machine in Cloud Computing to Minimize Energy Consumption : A Review Paper

Abstract

Cloud computing is an emerging computing technology for large data centers that maintains computational resources through the internet, rather than on local computers. VM migration provides the capability to balance the load, system maintenance and fault tolerance, etc. However, existing migration techniques, used to migrate virtual machines keeping memory images of VMs in host and skipping transfer of unchanged memory pages to reduce the amount of transfer data during migration, if number of migrations increases, number of memory images stored on host are also increased, this causes memory starvation.  In this paper, a propose technique that reduces the size of memory image stored on source host before migration.  When a VM migrates to other host, memory images of VM is kept in the source host after removing unwanted data according to the Probability factor. When the VM migrates back to the original host later, the kept memory image will be “reused”, i.e. data which are identical to the kept data will not be transferred and comparative to existing system the size of memory image is small. To validate this approach, evaluate the results using different threshold levels and probability factor of change in data. Proposed system required less memory to store the memory image and allow more VMs to be hosted. Specifically, proposed work is used to improve resource efficiency throughout by reducing the size of memory image that is stored on source host.

Keywords: Cloud computing, Migration, Virtualization, Virtual Machine, Physical Machine, Live Virtual Machine Migration.