A Remote USB Architecture for Virtual Machine Oriented Device Sharing and Transparent Mgration

IaaS cloud environments which are driven by virtualization technologies enable managing applications and resources in a cost-efficient way and become the main operating environments of modern data centers. While, in such environments, how to use remote peripheral devices in a virtual machine (VM) becomes a key research problem, and the problem is aggravated when facing VM migration. The state of the art migration technologies lack for the consideration of peripheral devices, which can result in data loss. To address these two problems, the paper presents a remote USB architecture, which consists of two parts: the virtual machine oriented USB device sharing (VMDS) and transparent virtual USB device migration (TVDM). VMDS is used to share locally attached USB devices to remote virtual machines, and TVDM supports continuous accessing to remote devices during virtual machine live migration. A system based on Linux and KVM is implemented to demonstrate the ideas. Experimental evaluations illustrate the system´s excellent usability and performance.