Who decides migration? A migration lock mechanism for virtual machines

Migration of virtual machines is an important feature for the management of a virtualized environment. Current strategies for managing migration consider more of resource scheduling and system maintenance, ignoring possible constraints on migration from virtual machines and applications. This paper introduces a migration locking mechanism and its implementation on Xen. The virtual machine migration locking mechanism provides a standard interface for virtual machine users to control migration status of their virtual machines according to their own wishes, such as security, hardware or performance demands and so on. But forced migration locking by the end users or applications could conflict with the management decisions by managers or the virtual machine monitors. How to coordinate different requirements between virtual machine users and managers needs further discussion.