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-rw-r--r--docs/all/index.rst2
-rw-r--r--docs/all/live_migration.rst108
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diff --git a/docs/all/index.rst b/docs/all/index.rst
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--- a/docs/all/index.rst
+++ b/docs/all/index.rst
@@ -41,4 +41,4 @@ Setup Guides
environment-setup
tunning
-
+ live_migration
diff --git a/docs/all/live_migration.rst b/docs/all/live_migration.rst
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@@ -0,0 +1,108 @@
+Fast Live Migration
+===================
+
+The NFV project requires fast live migration. The specific requirement is total
+live migration time < 2Sec, while keeping the VM down time < 10ms when running
+DPDK L2 forwarding workload.
+
+We measured the baseline data of migrating an idle 8GiB guest running a DPDK L2
+forwarding work load and observed that the total live migration time was 2271ms
+while the VM downtime was 26ms. Both of these two indicators failed to satisfy
+the requirements.
+
+Current Challenges
+------------------
+
+The following 4 features have been developed over the years to make the live
+migration process faster.
+
++ XBZRLE:
+ Helps to reduce the network traffic by just sending the
+ compressed data.
++ RDMA:
+ Uses a specific NIC to increase the efficiency of data
+ transmission.
++ Multi thread compression:
+ Compresses the data before transmission.
++ Auto convergence:
+ Reduces the data rate of dirty pages.
+
+Tests show none of the above features can satisfy the requirement of NFV.
+XBZRLE and Multi thread compression do the compression entirely in software and
+they are not fast enough in a 10Gbps network environment. RDMA is not flexible
+because it has to transport all the guest memory to the destination without zero
+page optimization. Auto convergence is not appropriate for NFV because it will
+impact guest’s performance.
+
+So we need to find other ways for optimization.
+
+Optimizations
+-------------------------
+a. Delay non-emergency operations
+ By profiling, it was discovered that some of the cleanup operations during
+ the stop and copy stage are the main reason for the long VM down time. The
+ cleanup operation includes stopping the dirty page logging, which is a time
+ consuming operation. By deferring these operations until the data transmission
+ is completed the VM down time is reduced to about 5-7ms.
+b. Optimize zero page checking
+ Currently QEMU uses the SSE2 instruction to optimize the zero pages
+ checking. The SSE2 instruction can process 16 bytes per instruction. By using
+ the AVX2 instruction, we can process 32 bytes per instruction. Testingt shows
+ that using AVX2 can speed up the zero pages checking process by about 25%.
+c. Remove unnecessary context synchronization.
+ The CPU context was being synchronized twice during live migration. Removing
+ this unnecessary synchronization shortened the VM downtime by about 100us.
+
+Test Environment
+----------------
+
+The source and destination host have the same hardware and OS:
+::
+Host: HSW-EP
+CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2699 v3 @ 2.30GHz
+RAM: 64G
+OS: RHEL 7.1
+Kernel: 4.2
+QEMU v2.4.0
+
+Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller 10-Gigabit X540-AT2 (rev 01)
+QEMU parameters:
+::
+ /root/qemu.git/x86_64-softmmu/qemu-system-x86_64-enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 4 –device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net1,mac=52:54:00:12:34:56 –netdev type=tap,id=net1,script=/etc/kvm/qemu-ifup,downscript=no,vhost=on–device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net2,mac=54:54:00:12:34:56 –netdevtype=tap,id=net2,script=/etc/kvm/qemu-ifup2,downscript=no,vhost=on -balloon virtio -m 8192-monitor stdio /mnt/liang/ia32e_rhel6u5.qcow
+
+Network connection
+
+.. figure:: lmnetwork.jpg
+ :align: center
+ :alt: live migration network connection
+ :figwidth: 80%
+
+
+Test Result
+-----------
+The down time is set to 10ms when doing the test. We use pktgen to send the
+packages to guest, the package size is 64 bytes, and the line rate is 2013
+Mbps.
+
+a. Total live migration time
+
+ The total live migration time before and after optimization is shown in the
+ chart below. For an idle guest, we can reduce the total live migration time
+ from 2070ms to 401ms. For a guest running the DPDK L2 forwarding workload,
+ the total live migration time is reduced from 2271ms to 654ms.
+
+.. figure:: lmtotaltime.jpg
+ :align: center
+ :alt: total live migration time
+
+b. VM downtime
+
+ The VM down time before and after optimization is shown in the chart below.
+ For an idle guest, we can reduce the VM down time from 29ms to 9ms. For a guest
+ running the DPDK L2 forwarding workload, the VM down time is reduced from 26ms to
+ 5ms.
+
+.. figure:: lmdowntime.jpg
+ :align: center
+ :alt: vm downtime
+ :figwidth: 80%
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