Survey of Virtual Machine Migration Techniques

Abstract

— A useful feature provided by Virtual Machine (VM) technologies is the ability to migrate running OS instances across distinct physical nodes. Migration is the ability to move a VM from one physical server to another. This capability is being increasingly utilized in today's enterprise environments to provide efficient online system maintenance, reconfiguration, load balancing and proactive fault tolerance. They provide desirable features to meet requirements of computing resources in modern computing systems, including server consolidation, performance isolation and ease of management. As a result, many implementations are available which support the feature using disparate functionalities. This paper surveys proposed and implemented mechanisms for VM migration. We pay particular attention to the designer's goals such as migration of memory and network. We also look into the security and performance aspects of VM migration.