Seamless live migration of virtual machines over the MAN/WAN

The "VM Turntable" demonstrator at iGRID 2005 pioneered the integration of Virtual Machines (VMs) with deterministic "lightpath" network services across MAN/WAN. The results provide for a new stage of virtualization--one for which computation is no longer localized within a data center but rather can be migrated across geographical distances, with negligible downtime, transparently to running applications and external clients. A noteworthy data point indicates that a live VM was migrated between Amsterdam, NL and San Diego, USA with just 1 to 2 seconds of application downtime. When compared to intra-LAN local migrations, downtime is only about 510 times greater despite 1,000 times higher round-trip-times.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: FGCS
• Authors: Franco Travostino, Paul Daspit, Leon Gommans, Chetan Jog, Cees T. A. M. de Laat, Joe Mambretti, Inder Monga, Bas van Oudenaarde, Satish Raghunath, Phil Yonghui Wang
• Keywords: Downtime, FGCS 2006, Negligible Downtime, Virtual Machines