Black-box and gray-box strategies for virtual machine migration

Virtualization can provide significant benefits in data centers by enabling virtual machine migration to eliminate hotspots. We present Sandpiper, a system that automates the task of monitoring and detecting hotspots, determining a new mapping of physical to virtual resources and initiating the necessary migrations. Sandpiper implements a black-box approach that is fully OS- and application-agnostic and a gray-box approach that exploits OS- and application-level statistics. We implement our techniques in Xen and conduct a detailed evaluation using a mix of CPU, network and memory-intensive applications. Our results show that Sandpiper is able to resolve single server hotspots within 20 seconds and scales well…