A Live Storage Migration Mechanism over WAN for Relocatable Virtual Machine Services on Clouds

IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) is an emerging concept of cloud computing, which allows users to obtain hardware resources from virtualized datacenters. Although many commercial IaaS clouds have recently been launched, dynamic virtual machine (VM) migration is not possible among service providers; users are locked into a particular provider, and cannot transparently relocate their VMs to another one for the best cost-effectiveness. In this paper, we propose an advanced storage access mechanism that strongly supports live VM migration over WAN. It rapidly relocates VM disks between source and destination sites with the minimum impact on I/O performance. The proposed mechanism addresses I/O consistency of virtual disks before/after migration, which is the major issue regarding wide-area live migration. The proposed mechanism works as a storage server of a block-level storage I/O protocol (e.g., iSCSI and NBD). Two key techniques (on-demand fetching and background copying) move on-line...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: CCGRID
• Authors: Takahiro Hirofuchi, Hirotaka Ogawa, Hidemoto Nakada, Satoshi Itoh, Satoshi Sekiguchi
• Keywords: CCGRID 2009, Commercial Iaas Clouds, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Live Vm Migration, Virtual Disks