Virtual Machine Migration Based on Coalition Formation Game

Virtualization has been regarded as a key technology to diversify computing resources and facilitate system management in cloud datacenters. However, the improper allocation way of virtual machines (VMs) results in the imbalanced resource allocation, and cause some physical machines (PMs) to overload while others to underutilize. Virtual machine migration is a method to help cloud service providers manage cloud resources effectively and automatically. We model the VM migration problem as coalition formation game (VMM-CFG), and propose a merge and split algorithm to implement VM migration. First of all, some VMs in the overloaded PMs are selected to be migrated. After that, the VMs to be migrated form effective coalitions independently and autonomously, and then the coalitions are mapping to the corresponding underloaded PMs. The simulation results show that VMM-CFG mechanism is well behaved in load-balance and communication costs.