A Survey Of Live Virtual Machine Migration Techniques

Live Virtual Machine migration is the process of moving a running VM from one physical host to another with minimal disruption to ongoing services. It is a powerful tool that facilitates hardware maintenance, load balancing, fault tolerance, and power saving in clusters and data centers. A key challenge with live migration is that it is difficult to simultaneously meet the goals of minimizing downtime, total migration time, and the CPU and network resources used. In this paper, we discuss weaknesses and strengths of state-of-the-art live migration techniques, and the impact of workload characteristics on the suitability of different migration mechanisms. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.