Virtual Machine Migration In Heterogeneous Clouds: From Openstack To Vmware

Adopting a Cloud solution means binding to a specific platform and vendor, with proprietary protocols, standards and tools so usually running into a vendor lock-in. The fear of vendor lock-in is often cited as a major impediment to Cloud service adoption. In this work, we focus on the Virtual Machine (VM) migration between homogeneous and heterogeneous Cloud platforms. We focused on the technical parameters that are essential to be tuned, depending on the various types of virtualization engines used by the Cloud environments. The key difference is the configuration requirements mainly related with image formats and used hypervisors. To demonstrate heterogeneous VM migration we develop a tool that works for OpenStack and VMWare platforms. The experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our solution with regards to the HTTP response times, especially between the heterogeneous Cloud platforms. The tool achieves approximately two milliseconds response time for HTTP requests to Cloud APIs, excluding the time required to download and upload image files.