Physical Machine State Migration

A powerful functionality enabled by modern virtualization technologies is the ability to move a virtual machine (VM) from one physical machine to another, which enables unprecedented flexibility for system fault tolerance and load balancing. However, no similar capability exists for physical machines. This paper describes the first known successful implementation of migrating a physical machine´s state from one physical Linux machine to another. This physical machine state migration (PMSM) capability greatly decreases the amount of disruption due to scheduled shut-down for non-virtualized physical machines, and is more challenging than VM migration because it cannot rely on a separate piece of software to perform the state transfer, e.g., the hyper visor in the case of VM migration. The PMSM prototype described in this paper is adapted from Linux´s hibernation facility. The current PMSM prototype can migrate a physical machine running the MySQL DBMS server under 7 seconds.