A Comparative Study of Pre-Copy based Live Virtual Machine Migration Techniques

Virtual Machine(VM) migration is a powerful management technique that gives data center users the ability to adapt the placement of VMs in order to better satisfy performance objectives, improve resource utilization and communication locality, load balancing, mitigate performance hotspots, achieve fault tolerance, reduce energy consumption, and facilitate system maintenance activities. Live migration defines movement of VMs form one physical host to another without disrupting the client or application. One of the objectives of live migration is that it should have minimum migration time as well as downtime so that applications running on VM are suspended for negligible time. In this paper we focus on various pre-copy based live virtual machine migration techniques and compare them based on key performance metrics like downtime, total migration time, total no of bytes transferred, etc. Keywords: Virtualization; Virtual Machine; Live Migration; Downtime; Total Migration Time; Pre Copy