US Patent 11327780 Network-efficient isolation environment redistribution

Network-efficient isolation environment redistribution is described. In one example, network communications are surveyed among isolation environments, such as virtual machines (VMs) and containers, hosted on a cluster. An affinity for network communications between the isolation environments can be identified based on the survey. Pairs or groups of the isolation environments can be examined to identify ones which have an affinity for network communications between them but are also hosted on different host machines in the cluster. The identification of the affinity for network communications provides network-level context for migration decisions by a distributed resource scheduler. Certain VMs and containers can then be migrated by the distributed resource scheduler to reduce the network communications in the cluster based on the network-level context information. In some cases, migration decisions can be conducted with reference to both network-level context information and other application-affinity policies.