Comprehensive Analysis of VM Migration Trends in Cloud Data Centers

Background: Virtualization adequately maintains increasing requirements for storage, networking, servers, and computing in exhaustive cloud data centers (CDC)s. Virtualization assists in gaining different objectives like dedicated server sustenance, fault tolerance, comprehensive service availability, and load balancing, by virtual machine (VM) migration. The VM migration process continuously requires CPU cycles, communication bandwidth, memory, and processing power. Therefore, it detrimentally prevails over the performance of dynamic applications and cannot be completely neglected in the synchronous large-scale CDC, explicitly when service level agreement (SLA) and analytical trade goals are to be defined. Introduction: Live VM migration is intermittently adopted as it grants the operational service even when the migration is executed. Currently, power competence has been identified as the primary design requirement for the current CDC model. It grows from a single server to numerous data centres and clouds, which consume an extensive amount of electricity. Consequently, appropriate energy management techniques are especially important for CDCs. Methods: This review paper delineates the need for energy efficiency in the CDC, the systematic mapping of VM migration methods, and research pertinent to it. After that, an analysis of VM migration techniques, the category of VM migration, duplication, and context-based VM migration is presented along with its relative analysis. Results: The various VM migration techniques were compared on the basis of various performance measures. The techniques based on duplication and context-based VM migration methods provide an average reduction in migration time of up to 38.47%, data transfer rate of up to 51.4%, migration downtime of up to 36.33%, network traffic rate of up to 44% and reduced application efficiency overhead up to 14.27%. Conclusion: The study aids in analyzing threats and research challenges related to VM migration techniques which ultimately help in exploring future research directions that would help aspiring cloud professionals.