CHAPTER 5

VIRTUAL MACHINES PROVISIONING AND

MIGRATION SERVICES
 INTRODUCTION AND INSPIRATION

Cloud computing builds on service-oriented architecture

(SOA), grid computing, and virtualization technology
 Offers infrastructure as a service to the end users as a public utility
service
 Based on pay-as-you-use and on-demand computing models
 Referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

The provisioning of the cloud infrastructure in data centers

is a prerequisite
 The provisioning for systems and applications on a large number of
physical machines is a time-consuming process
 INTRODUCTION AND INSPIRATION (CONT.)

 With low assurance on deployment’s time and cost

 Two core services enable the users to get the best out of the IaaS
model in public and private cloud setups
 Virtual machine provisioning and migration services

Much time was spent to install and provision a new server

 When installing a new server for a certain workload to provide a
service for a client
 Check the inventory for a new machine
 Get one, format, install OS required, install services
 A server is needed along with lots of security batches and appliances
 INTRODUCTION AND INSPIRATION (CONT.)

With the emergence of virtualization technology and the

cloud computing IaaS model
 To provision a virtual server through a self-service interface with
small steps to get what you desire with the required specifications
 Provisioning this machine in a public cloud like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2)
 Or using a virtualization management software package
 Or a private cloud management solution installed at your data center
 Inside the organization and within the private cloud setup
 INTRODUCTION AND INSPIRATION (CONT.)

 The value of virtualization and the way virtual machines are

provisioned

Whenever there was a need for performing a server’s

upgrade or performing maintenance tasks
 An expensive operation to maintain or upgrade a main server that
has lots of applications and users
 With the advance of the revolutionized virtualization technology
and migration services associated with hypervisors’ capabilities
 These tasks (maintenance, upgrades, patches, etc.) need no time to accomplish
 INTRODUCTION AND INSPIRATION (CONT.)

Provisioning a new virtual machine is a matter of minutes

Migrations of a virtual machine is a matter of milliseconds
 VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW

Virtualization facilitates the providing and management of

the dynamic data center’s infrastructure
 An essential and enabling technology of cloud computing
environments
 The abstraction of the four computing resources
 Storage, processing power, memory, and network or I/O
 Conceptually similar to emulation
 A system pretends to be another system
 Virtualization is a system pretending to be two or more of the same system
VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW
(CONT.)
 VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW
(CONT.)

A layered virtualization technology architecture

 The virtualization layer will partition the physical resource of the
underlying physical server into multiple virtual machines with
different workloads
 Schedules, allocates the physical resource
 Makes a virtual machine think it totally owns the whole underlying
hardware’s physical resource
 Processor, disks, RAMs, etc.

Virtual machine's technology manages resources in cloud

computing environments
 VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW
(CONT.)

 Improves the utilization of such resources by multiplexing many

virtual machines on one physical host
 Server consolidation
 Machines can be scaled up and down on demand with a high level
of resources’ abstraction
 Enables high, reliable, and agile deployment mechanisms and
management of services
 Providing on-demand cloning and live migration services which improve
reliability

Having an effective management’s suite for managing

virtual machines’ infrastructure is critical for a cloud
computing IaaS vendor
 PUBLIC CLOUD AND INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES

Public cloud or external cloud

 Resources are dynamically provisioned via publicly accessible Web
applications/Web services (SOAP or RESTful interfaces) from an off-
site third-party provider
 Shares resources and bills on a fine-grained utility computing basis
 The user pays only for the capacity of the provisioned resources at a
particular time
 Examples for vendors who publicly provide IaaS
 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) GoGrid, Joyent Accelerator, Rackspace,
AppNexus, FlexiScale, and Manjrasoft Aneka
 PUBLIC CLOUD AND INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES
(CONT.)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is an IaaS service

 Provides elastic compute capacity in the cloud
 Leveraged via Web services (SOAP or REST), a Web-based AWS
(Amazon Web Service) management console, or the EC2 command
line tools
 Provides hundreds of pre-made AMIs (Amazon Machine Images)
with a variety of operating systems and pre-loaded software
 i.e., Linux, OpenSolaris, or Windows
 Provides complete control of computing resources
 PUBLIC CLOUD AND INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES
(CONT.)

 Run on Amazon’s computing and infrastructure environment easily

 Reduces the time required for obtaining and booting a new server’s
instances to minutes
 Allows a quick scalable capacity and resources, up and down
 As the computing requirements change
 Offers different instances’ size according to
 The resources’ needs (small, large, and extra large)
 The high CPU’s needs it provides (medium and extra large high CPU instances)
 High-memory instances (extra large, double extra large, and quadruple extra
large instance)
 PRIVATE CLOUD AND INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES

A private cloud aims at providing public cloud

functionality
 Maintaining control over an organization’s data and resources to
meet security and governance’s requirements in an organization
 A highly virtualized cloud data center located inside the
organization’s firewall
 Also be a private space dedicated for the company within a cloud
vendor’s data center
 Designed to handle the organization’s workloads

Private clouds exhibit the following characteristics:

 PRIVATE CLOUD AND INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES
(CONT.)

 Allow service provisioning and compute capability for an

organization’s users in a self-service manner
 Automate and provide well-managed virtualized environments
 Optimize computing resources, and servers’ utilization
 Support specific workloads

Examples for vendors and frameworks that provide Iaas in

private setups
 Eucalyptus and OpenNebula
 PRIVATE CLOUD AND INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES
(CONT.)

A third type of cloud setup named hybrid cloud

 A combination of private/internal and external cloud resources
 Existing together by enabling outsourcing of noncritical services and functions
in public cloud and keeping the critical ones internal
 Releases resources from a public cloud
 Handles sudden demand usage
 Called cloud bursting
 DISTRIBUTED MANAGEMENT OF VIRTUALIZATION

Virtualization needs a powerful management capabilities

 Many commercial, open source products and research projects are
being developed to dynamically provision virtual machines
 e.g., OpenNebula , IBM Virtualization Manager, Joyent, and VMware DRS
 Utilizing the physical infrastructure
 Some commercial and scientific infrastructure cloud computing
initiatives provide remote interfaces for controlling and monitoring
virtual resources
 e.g., Globus VWS, Eucalyptus and Amazon
 DISTRIBUTED MANAGEMENT OF VIRTUALIZATION
(CONT.)

The RESERVOIR initiative

 Grid interfaces and protocols enable the required interoperability
between the clouds or infrastructure’s providers
 Needs to expand substantially on the current state-of-the-art for
grid-wide accounting
 Also to increase the flexibility of supporting different billing schemes,
and accounting for services with indefinite lifetime
 HIGH AVAILABILITY

A system design protocol and an associated

implementation
 Ensures a certain absolute degree of operational continuity during a
given measurement period

Availability refers to the ability of a user’s community to

access the system
 Submitting new work, updating or altering existing work, or
collecting the results of the previous work
 Unavailable: A user cannot access the system
 Services should be available all the time
 HIGH AVAILABILITY (CONT.)

 Along with some planned/unplanned downtime according to a

certain SLA
 SLA formalizes the service availability objectives and requirements
 The monthly availability or downtime of a service
 To calculate the service’s credits to match the billing cycles

Business critical services are often categorized as high

availability services
 Achieving the lowest possible amount of planned and unplanned
downtime

A virtual environment is the larger part of any

organization
 HIGH AVAILABILITY (CONT.)

 Management of these virtual resources within this environment

becomes a critical mission
 The migration services of these resources became a corner stone
 In achieving high availability for these services hosted by VMs

High availability allows virtual machines to automatically

be restarted
 In case of an underlying hardware failure or individual VM failure
 If one of servers fails, the VMs will be restarted on other virtualized
servers in the resource pool
 Restoring the essential services with minimal service interruption
 CLOUD AND VIRTUALIZATION STANDARDIZATION
EFFORTS

Standardization is important to ensure interoperability

The prevalent standards that make cloud computing and
virtualization possible
 Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) have produced
standards for almost all the aspects of virtualization technology
 DMTF initiated the VMAN (Virtualization Management) Initiative
 Delivers broadly supported interoperability and portability standards for
managing the virtual computing lifecycle
 CLOUD AND VIRTUALIZATION STANDARDIZATION
EFFORTS (CONT.)

 VMAN’s OVF (Open Virtualization Format)

 A collaboration between industry key players
 Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, XenSource, and Vmware
 OVF provides a common format to package and securely distribute
virtual appliances across multiple virtualization platforms
 VMAN profiles define a consistent way of managing a
heterogeneous virtualized environment
 OCCI AND OGF

Another standardization effort has been initiated by

Open Grid Forum (OGF)
 To deliver a standard API for cloud IaaS
 Open Cloud Computing Interface Working Group (OCCI-WG)
 Dedicated for delivering an API specification for the remote management of
cloud computing’s infrastructure
 For allowing the development of interoperable tools for common tasks
including deployment, autonomic scaling, and monitoring
 Covering a high-level functionality required for managing the life-cycle virtual
machines/workloads, running on virtualization technologies/containers and
supporting service elasticity
 OCCI AND OGF (CONT.)

The new API for interfacing IaaS cloud computing facilities

will allow
 Consumers to interact with cloud computing infrastructure on an ad
hoc basis
 Integrators to offer advanced management services
 Aggregators to offer a single common interface to multiple
providers
 Providers to offer a standard interface that is compatible with the
available tools
 Vendors of grids/clouds to offer standard interfaces for dynamically
scalable service’s delivery in their products
 VIRTUAL MACHINES PROVISIONING AND
MANAGEABILITY

An overview on the typical life cycle of VM and its major

possible states of operation
 Make the management and automation of VMs in virtual and cloud
environments easier
 Starts by a request delivered to the IT department
 Stating the requirement for creating a new server for a particular service
 Processed by the IT administration to start seeing the servers’
resource pool
 Matching these resources with the requirements
 Starting the provision of the needed virtual machine
 VIRTUAL MACHINES PROVISIONING AND
MANAGEABILITY (CONT.)

 Once it is provisioned and started

 Ready to provide the required service according to an SLA
 A time period after which the VM is being released
 Free resources
VIRTUAL MACHINES PROVISIONING AND
MANAGEABILITY (CONT.)
 VM PROVISIONING PROCESS

The common and normal steps of provisioning a virtual

server
 Select a server from a pool of available servers along with the
appropriate OS template
 Physical servers with enough capacity
 Load the appropriate software
 Operating system, device drivers, middleware, and the needed applications
for the service required
 Customize and configure the machine to configure an associated
network and storage resources
 e.g., IP address, Gateway
 VM PROVISIONING PROCESS (CONT.)

 The virtual server is ready to start with its newly loaded software
 Performed by an IT or a data center’s specialist to provision a
particular virtual machine

Server provisioning is defining server’s configuration

 Based on the organization requirements, a hardware, and software
component
 Processor, RAM, storage, networking, operating system, applications,
etc.

Virtual machines can be provisioned

 By manually installing an operating system
VM PROVISIONING PROCESS (CONT.)
 VM PROVISIONING PROCESS (CONT.)

 By using a preconfigured VM template

 By cloning an existing VM
 By importing a physical server or a virtual server from another
hosting platform

Physical servers can also be virtualized and provisioned

using P2V (physical to virtual) tools and techniques
 e.g., virt-p2v

A template can be created

 After creating a virtual machine by virtualizing a physical server or
by building a new virtual server in the virtual environment
 VM PROVISIONING PROCESS (CONT.)

 Most virtualization management vendors provide the data center’s

administration with the ability to do such tasks in an easy way
 e.g., VMware, XenServer, etc.
 Provisioning from a template is an invaluable feature
 Reduces the time required to create a new virtual machine

Administrators can create different templates for different

purposes
 Create a Windows 2003 Server template for the finance
department
 VM PROVISIONING PROCESS (CONT.)

 Or a Red Hat Linux template for the engineering department

 Enables the administrator to quickly provision a correctly configured
virtual server on demand

The problem of virtual machine’s sprawl

 Virtual machines are provisioned so rapidly that documenting and
managing the virtual machine’s life cycle become a challenge
 VIRTUAL MACHINE MIGRATION SERVICES

Migration service is the process of moving a virtual

machine from one host server or storage location to
another
Different techniques of VM migration
 Hot/life migration, cold/regular migration, and live storage
migration of a virtual machine

In this process, all key machines’ components, are

completely virtualized
 e.g., CPU, storage disks, networking, memory
 Facilitating the entire state of a virtual machine to be captured by a
set of easily moved data files
 MIGRATIONS TECHNIQUES

Live migration
 Also called hot or real-time migration
 The movement of a virtual machine from one physical host to another
while being powered on
 Without any noticeable effect from the end user’s point of view (a matter of
milliseconds)
 Facilitates proactive maintenance upon failure
 The potential problem can be resolved before the disruption of service occurs
 Used for load balancing
 Work is shared among computers optimize the utilization of available CPU
resources
 MIGRATIONS TECHNIQUES (CONT.)

Live migration’s mechanism

 How memory and virtual machine states are being transferred
through the network from one host A to another host B
 e.g., the Xen hypervisor
 The process has been viewed as a transactional interaction between
the two hosts involved
 Stage 0: Pre-Migration
 An active virtual machine exists on the physical host A
 Stage 1: Reservation
 A request is issued to migrate an OS from host A to B
 The necessary resources exist on B and on a VM container of that size
 MIGRATIONS TECHNIQUES (CONT.)

 Stage 2: Iterative Pre-Copy

 During the first iteration, all pages are transferred from A to B
 Iterations copy only those pages dirtied during the previous transfer phase
 Stage 3: Stop-and-Copy
 Running OS instance at A is suspended
 The network traffic is redirected to B
 CPU state and any remaining inconsistent memory pages are then transferred
 Stage 4: Commitment
 Host B indicates to A that it has successfully received a consistent OS image
 MIGRATIONS TECHNIQUES (CONT.)

 Host A acknowledges this message as a commitment of the migration

transaction
 Host A may now discard the original VM
 Host B becomes the primary host
 Stage 5: Activation
 The migrated VM on B is now activated
 Post-migration code runs to reattach the device’s drivers to the new machine
and advertise moved IP addresses
 An approach to failure management
 At least one host has a consistent VM image at all times during migration
 The original host remains stable until the migration commits
MIGRATIONS TECHNIQUES (CONT.)
MIGRATIONS TECHNIQUES (CONT.)
 The VM may be suspended and resumed on that host with no risk of failure
 A migration request essentially attempts to move the VM to a new
host
 On any sort of failure, execution is resumed locally
 Aborting the migration

Live migration effect on a running web server

 A highly loaded server can be migrated with both controlled impact
on live services and a short downtime
 The working set of the server is rather small
 A relatively easy case of live migration
MIGRATIONS TECHNIQUES (CONT.)
 MIGRATIONS TECHNIQUES (CONT.)

VM management and provisioning tools

 Provide the live migration of VM facility
 e.g., VMware VMotion and Citrix XenServer XenMotion

VMware Vmotion
 Allows users to automatically optimize and allocate an entire pool of
resources
 For maximum hardware utilization, flexibility, and availability
 To perform hardware’s maintenance without scheduled downtime
 Along with migrating virtual machines away from failing or underperforming
servers
 MIGRATIONS TECHNIQUES (CONT.)

Citrix XenServer XenMotion

 Inherited from the Xen live migrate utility
 Provides the IT administrator with the facility to move a running VM
from one XenServer to another in the same pool without interrupting
the service
 Hypothetically for zero-downtime server maintenance
 Actually takes minutes
 A highly available service
 A good feature to balance the workloads on the virtualized
environment
Cold migration
 The migration of a powered-off virtual machine
 MIGRATIONS TECHNIQUES (CONT.)

 The option of moving the associated disks from one data store to
another
 The virtual machines are not required to be on a shared storage
 Live migration needs a shared storage for virtual machines in the server’s pool
 In live migration for a virtual machine between two hosts, there
would be certain CPU compatibility checks to be applied
 In cold migration this checks do not apply
 The cold migration process is simple
 The configuration files are moved from the source host to the destination host’s
associated storage area
 MIGRATIONS TECHNIQUES (CONT.)

 Including the NVRAM file (BIOS settings), log files, as well as the disks of the
virtual machine
 The virtual machine is registered with the new host
 After the migration is completed, the old version of the virtual machine is
deleted from the source host

Live Storage Migration of Virtual Machine

 Moving the virtual disks or configuration file of a running virtual
machine to a new data store
 Without any interruption in the availability of the virtual machine’s service
 VM MIGRATION, SLA AND ON-DEMAND
COMPUTING

Virtual machines’ migration

 Making it easy to adjust resource’s priorities to match resource’s
demand conditions
 Meeting SLAs
 A particular VM is consuming more than its fair share of resources at
the expense of other VMs on the same host
 Eligible to either be moved to another underutilized host
 Or to assign more resources for it in case that the host machine still has
resources
 Highly avoid the violations of the SLA
 Fulfill the requirements of on-demand computing resources
 VM MIGRATION, SLA AND ON-DEMAND
COMPUTING (CONT.)

An integration between virtualization’s management tools

and SLA’s management tools
 With its migrations and performance’s monitoring capabilities
 To achieve balance in resources by migrating and monitoring the
workloads
 Meeting the SLA
 MIGRATION OF VIRTUAL MACHINES TO
ALTERNATE PLATFORMS

The ability to migrate virtual machines from one platform

to another
 Numerous ways for achieving this
 Depending on the source and target virtualization’s platforms
 And on the vendor’s tools that manage this facility
 e.g., The VMware converter handles migrations between ESX hosts,
the VMware server, and the VMware workstation
 Can also import from other virtualization platforms, such as Microsoft virtual
server machines