Abstract
Live migration technology for virtual machines provides greater flexibility when scheduling tasks in a cloud environment. This flexibility helps increase the utilization of resources within the cloud. A key component of live migration technology is the pre-copy strategy. The pre-copy strategy allows virtual machine to perform live migration without interruption of service. However, in order for live migration to be efficient, it is imperative that virtual machines' memories are not limited by bandwidth and that the downtime of the virtual machines involved is minimal. This paper presents an adaptive pre-copy strategy for virtual machine live migration called Multi-Phase Pre-Copy (MPP). In iterative pre-copy stage MPP transmits memory pages only when a predefined threshold is met. This strategy significantly reduces unnecessary migration of memory pages. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.