vMotion and Apache Geode: The impact of live migration of vm'ss on an in-memory data grid
Channel: The ASF
Date: 15/10/2020

vMotion and Apache Geode: Investigating the impact of live migration of virtual machines on an in-memory data grid
Nabarun Nag

A presentation from ApacheCon @Home 2020
https://apachecon.com/acah2020/

Avoiding downtime during maintenance or unforeseen machine issues is paramount for mission-critical, ready and available systems. To achieve this goal, VMware vSphere vMotion provides the capability for a zero-downtime live migration of virtual machine workloads from one server to another. During the entire duration of migration, all applications continue running and providing access to users. This feature can be also be automated using Dynamic Resource Scheduler which places a virtual machine in an optimal location in the server cluster. Pivotal Cloud Cache is an in-memory key-value store powered by Apache Geode, which is responsible for responding to large volume of concurrent read/write requests without compromising throughput and latency. Pivotal Cloud Cache also serves multiple use cases like event processing, transaction and session state caching, etc. in industries like finance and travel. To evaluate the impact of vMotion migration of virtual machines hosting Cloud Cache servers, we devised experiments where we deploy a Cloud Cache cluster using the Pivotal Platform in VMware’s Solutions lab. We then continuously migrate the virtual machines using vSphere SDK, while the cluster is under read and write workloads. We measure the impact on latency and throughput and also monitor that no members are being kicked out of the distributed system due to lack of response to heartbeat messages during the migration phase. This paper discusses the experiment design and results in detail.

Nabarun has been a code contributor and PMC member for Apache Geode since 2016, after graduating from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to that, he worked for Samsung Research Institute. In his spare time, he likes to explore Portland's food scene and playing Apex Legends and Overwatch