Live virtual machine migration techniques: Survey and research challenges

Cloud is an emerging technology in the world of information technology and is built on the key concept of virtualization. Virtualization separates hardware from software and has benefits of server consolidation and live migration. Live migration is a useful tool for migrating OS instances across distant physical of data centers and clusters. It facilitates load balancing, fault management, low-level system maintenance and reduction in energy consumption. In this paper, we survey the major issues of virtual machine live migration. We discuss how the key performance metrics e.g downtime, total migration time and transferred data are affected when a live virtual machine is migrated over WAN, with heavy workload or when VMs are migrated together. We classify the techniques and compare the various techniques in a particular class.