Secure & agile wide-area virtual machine mobility

Global Information Grid (GIG) operations would benefit greatly from improved support for virtual machines (VMs) that can migrate not only between physical devices within a datacentre, but also between physical devices located on different continents, while maintaining their existing IP communications sessions. Such VM migration can enable improvements with: CPU load-balancing, network traffic-engineering, distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, fault-tolerance, and resilience. Existing migration approaches often require complex network configuration and management, may often require use of expensive proprietary technologies, and also often require active cooperation from upstream service providers. We describe a VM mobility approach that enables datacentre operators to directly and unilaterally provide and control intra-site and wide-area VM mobility. We present several use cases with different degrees of location transparency. Our mechanism is based on a new naming approach which has been recommended for progression within the IETF.