Live wide-area migration of virtual machines including local persistent state

  • Authors:

  • Robert Bradford;Evangelos Kotsovinos;Anja Feldmann;Harald Schiöberg

  • Affiliations:

  • Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany;Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany;Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany;Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Virtual execution environments
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

So far virtual machine (VM) migration has focused on transferring the run-time memory state of the VMs in local area networks (LAN). However, for wide-area network (WAN) migration it is crucial to not just transfer the VMs image but also transfer its local persistent state (its file system) and its on-going network connections. In this paper we address both: by combining a block-level solution with pre-copying and write throttling we show that we can transfer an entire running web server, including its local persistent state, with minimal disruption --- three seconds in the LAN and 68 seconds in the WAN); by combining dynDNS with tunneling, existing connections can continue transparently while new ones are redirected to the new network location. Thus we show experimentally that by combining well-known techniques in a novel manner we can provide system support for migrating virtual execution environments in the wide area.