A Mobility Management System for the Global Live Migration of Virtual Machine across Multiple Sites

With rapid spread of virtualization technologies, Live migration which provides the ability to migrate a running virtual machine (VM) among physical hosts without interruption. Especially, Global Live Migration (GLM) which enables to migrate VM across the geographically-distributed Wide Area Networks (WANs) is an essential step towards development of the inter-cloud environment. However, GLM gets a bit complicated for network configuration compared with ordinary live migration. We have already proposed the GLM method which implements IP mobility support architecture with multiple interfaces to enable live migration among distributed sites consisting of different IP network segments. However, there is no sufficient consideration about the management of smooth handoff for the VM migration on the Internet. In this paper, we propose a mobility management system for GLM, and integrate into our developed nation-wide virtualization infrastructure. The proposed system enables VMs seamless handoff without any modification of the hypervisor while keeping network configuration of the migrating site. Performance evaluation shows the processing overhead of the proposed management system with GLM among multiple sites which are more than 600 km distant. As a result, we confirm that the proposed system provides smooth handoff for the VM on the widely-distributed environment if the proposed system is implemented.