Toward Automatically Deducing Key Device States for the Live Migration of Virtual Machines

The ability of migrating running virtual machines (VMs) in cloud environment provides significant benefits in dynamic resource load balancing and higher fault tolerance. The migration of a virtual machine consists of both the application/OS memory state migration and virtual hardware device state migration. Failures in the either of these two may lead to unpredictable behavior of the running VM. Previous researches have focused on the consistence of the application/OS memory state. In this paper, we inspect the migration of device states, which are also essential for the success of VM live migration. The current practice of defining device states is done by the developers of each virtual device and thus is prone to errors. We present an approach that automatically deduces what states are critical for a virtual device. Having the precise states defined is critical for the success of VM live migration.