Authors:

avatar of Martin Betak

Martin Betak

Feature pages are design documents that developers have created while collaborating on oVirt.

Most of them are outdated, but provide historical design context.

They are not user documentation and should not be treated as such.

Documentation is available here.

XBZRLE and Auto-Convergence

XBZRLE compression

By using XBZRLE (Xor Binary Zero Run-Length-Encoding) we can reduce VM downtime and total live-migration time of VMs running memory write intensive workloads typical of large enterprise applications such as SAP ERP Systems, and generally speaking for any application with a sparse memory update pattern.

On the sender side XBZRLE is used as a compact delta encoding of page updates, retrieving the old page content from an LRU cache (default size of 64 MB). The receiving side uses the existing page content and XBZRLE to decode the new page content.

Work was originally based on research results published VEE 2011: Evaluation of Delta Compression Techniques for Efficient Live Migration of Large Virtual Machines by Benoit, Svard, Tordsson and Elmroth. Additionally the delta encoder XBRLE was improved further using XBZRLE instead.

Auto-Convergence

Busy enterprise workloads hosted on large sized VM’s tend to dirty memory faster than the transfer rate achieved via live guest migration. Despite some good recent improvements (& using dedicated 10Gig NICs between hosts) the live migration may NOT converge.

Recently support was added in qemu (version 1.6) to allow a user to choose if they wish to force convergence of their migration via a new migration capability : “auto-converge”. This feature allows for qemu to auto-detect lack of convergence and trigger a throttle-down of the VCPUs.

Engine implementation

Support for configuration for above options at 3 levels:

  • engine-config -s (DefaultAutoConvergence DefaultMigrationCompression)=(true false)
  • cluster: true/false/inherit global ^^ setting
  • vm: true/false/inherit cluster ^^ setting

VDSM implementation

Support for 2 new migration parameters autoConverge and migrateCompressed delegating to libvirt the appropriate flags.

Note: XBZRLE compression is supported in libvirt since RHEL 7.0 and auto-convergence since RHEL 7.1.

Relevant patches

http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/31991/ (merged)

http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/31992/ (merged)

http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/32495/

http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/32132/

http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/32133/

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