A Performance Improvement Method for the Global Live Migration of Virtual Machine with IP Mobility

Virtual machine (VM) live migration, which is the ability to move a VM from one physical host to another under hypervisor control without suspending for a long time, is a capability being increasingly utilized. With IP mobility, a capability for migrating VMs among distributed sites is provided. We call it the global live migration. However, it affects an application program on a VM compared with ordinary live migration limited a local link. This problem is caused by IP mobility process is executed after migrating. In the proposed method, the source host executes the network configuration before migrating, which sets destination network information previously to the secondary interface of a VM. The method can reduce the number of steps for IP mobility process after migrating. We have implemented the prototype, and have evaluated our method quantitatively. By the evaluation experiment, we have confirmed that a VM’s application downtime during the global live migration is less than 1 second.