The common and normal steps of provisioning a virtual server • Select a server from a pool of
available servers (Physical servers with enough capacity) along with the appropriate OS template •
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 🞄 The virtual server is ready to
start with its newly loaded software • 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, by using a preconfigured VM template, by cloning an existing VM, or
by importing a physical server or a virtual server from another hosting platform Department of CSE
57 | P a g e A.Y 2023-2024 CLOUD COMPUTING 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/live migration ▫ cold/regular migration ▫ 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 Migration 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 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 ▫ Stage 2:
Iterative Pre-Copy During the first iteration, all pages are transferred from A to B 🞄 Subsequent
iterations copy only those pages dirtied during the previous transfer phase Department of CSE 58 | P
a g e A.Y 2023-2024 CLOUD COMPUTING ▫ 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 🞄 At the end of this stage, there is a consistent suspended copy
of the VM at both A and B. 🞄 Copy at A is considered primary and is resumed in case of failure ▫ Stage
4:Commitment 🞄 Host B indicates to A that it has successfully received a consistent OS image 🞄 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 This approach to failure management ensures 🞄 At least one host
has a consistent VM image at all times during migration 🞄 The original host remains stable until the
migration commits and 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 Department of CSE 59 | P a g e A.Y 2023-2024
CLOUD COMPUTING VM Management and Provisioning tools ▫ Provide the live migration of VM
facility ▫ e.g., VMware VMotion and Citrix XenServerXenMotion 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 Citrix
XenServerXenMotion ▫ Inherited from the Xen live migrate utility ▫ Provides the IT administrator with
the facility to move a running VM from one Xen Server to another in the same pool without
interrupting the service, making it 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 ▫ Associated disks can be moved from one data store to another ▫ The virtual machines are
not required to be on a shared storage Differences between Hot(Live) migration and Cold migration
• Live migration needs a shared storage for virtual machines in the server’s pool, but cold migration
does not • 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