Virtual Machine Upgrade Migration Strategy for Critical Workloads
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Solution Overview
Problem
In software-defined data centers, virtual machines (VMs) often experience multiple migrations during upgrades, leading to downtime, and reducing the number of migrations would be beneficial for critical workloads.
Innovation Solution
Designate critical workloads for only one migration during the upgrade process and prepare them early through in-app notifications to quiesce them, allowing for shorter monitoring windows and minimizing downtime.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If VMs are migrated multiple times during the upgrade process to achieve load balancing, then load balancing is improved, but downtime increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by designating critical VMs before the upgrade process begins, and by pre-migrating them to a different host before the upgrade. This preliminary designation and migration prevents these VMs from being migrated again during the upgrade process, thus reducing total migration count and downtime while still allowing non-critical VMs to be migrated for load balancing purposes.
2Loss of time
If critical VMs are designated and limited to one migration, then downtime is reduced, but migration complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies local quality by treating critical VMs differently from non-critical VMs. Critical VMs are designated with a special flag and subjected to different migration rules (limited to one migration and pre-migrated before upgrade). This localized differentiation reduces overall downtime for critical workloads while maintaining simpler migration processes for non-critical VMs, balancing complexity reduction with performance improvement.
3Loss of time
If VMs are quiesced early through in-app notifications, then monitoring window is shortened, but system coordination complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary action by sending in-app notifications to VMs to quiesce them before the actual migration process begins. This early quiescing shortens the monitoring window during which the VMs are in a transitional state. The automation of this process through in-app notifications manages the coordination complexity by providing structured communication channels between the management software and the VMs.
Data Source
AI summary
A method of upgrading a cluster of hosts, where the hosts are running at least one workload designated as critical, includes the steps of: adding a host that has been upgraded to the cluster of hosts, selecting one of the hosts for upgrade, determining whether any of the workloads running in the selected host are designated as critical, migrating all of the workloads from the selected host that are designated as critical to the added host, and migrating each of the workloads from the selected host that are not designated as critical to a selected one of the hosts of the cluster.