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[Xen-API] [RFC] Ballooning and live migration

To: "xen-api@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xen-api@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Jonathan Knowles <Jonathan.Knowles@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Xen-API] [RFC] Ballooning and live migration
From: George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2010 12:30:23 +0100
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At the moment (and as of the latest XenServer release), when migrating a VM, it is first ballooned down to static-min before the migration happens. I don't think this is the right behavior; my sense is that there's little or no benefit, and a big potential cost. So I'd like to open up a discussion on the topic.

I don't know the reason this behavior was decided, so I have go guess. Two reasons that come to mind are: 1. To reduce the network cost of migrating (lower memory -> fewer pages transferred)
2. To simplify logic of memory

#1 I don't think is actually true. Migration can only happen when the disk is on shared storage across a network. When the balloon driver inflates the balloon, dirty pages will be written to disk; and assuming the data was somehow useful, they'll be read back in on the other side when the balloon is deflated. So on the whole, the total number of pages over the network won't decrease; they'll just switch from migration traffic to disk traffic.

As for #2, I think that the following is simple enough:
* If free memory on migration target host >= VM memory target, just transfer as is. * If free memory on migration taget host < VM memory target, balloon down to free memory.

As for the cost: of course ballooning down has a cost, both in terms of cpu cycles spent, and dirty pages transferred over the network; and there's the cost on the other side of re-filling any pages that were swapped out. Furthermore, if the working set is greater than than static min, then ballooning down will cause the VM to thrash for the period of time while it's migrating, which is much worse than having a slightly longer migration time.

Thoughts?

-George


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