Efficient Physical To Virtual Machine Conversion System For Server Consolidation

Though virtualization technology has been widely adopted these years due to its advantages on improving server utilization, reducing management costs and energy consumption, there are still lots of legacy applications deployed in traditional physical machines instead of virtual ones. How to efficiently promote these physical servers into Virtual Machines(VMs) if necessary has been an interesting and challenging problem.Existing Physical-to-Virtual(P2V) conversion methods suffer from long server downtime during the converting process, which makes them impractical and inefficient in real world. In this thesis, we analyze the reasons why the previous approaches result in intolerable server downtime are longtime physical machine powering off and explicit disk synchronization process, and propose a new P2 V conversion system called Vshadow. It enables a native P2 V conversion which can quickly switch physical machine to a local VM, and combines implicit disk replication method and live migration process to promote physical machine into remote virtualization platform. Service down mainly exists in the native P2 V process except the implicit disk replication process while live migration process introduces negligible service downtime. As a result, total service downtime will be reduced sharply.We present an evaluation of our system with a number of different workloads. Experimental results show that our system can reduce the server downtime by more than 90% compared with existing P2 V conversion methods. Besides proving the effectiveness and efficiency of Vshadow, We also illustrate the possible ways to apply Vshadow in server consolidation of cloud data centers and to use Vshadow to build a cost-effective failover system.