vMocity: Traveling VMs Across Heterogeneous Clouds

Current IaaS cloud providers typically adopt different underlying cloud infrastructures and are reluctant to provide consistent interfaces to facilitate cross-cloud interoperability. Such status quo significantly complicates inter-cloud virtual machine relocation and impedes the adoption of cloud services for more enterprises and individual users. In this paper, we propose vMocity, a middleware framework enabling VM relocation across heterogeneous IaaS clouds. vMocity extends the principles of cold migration and decouples VM's storage stack from their underlying virtualization platforms, which presents a homogeneous view of storage to cloud users. We deploy our prototype system across three representative commercial cloud platforms — Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and VMware vSphere-based private cloud. Compared to existing approaches on both synthetic and real-world work-loads, vMocity can significantly reduce the disruption time, up to 27 times shorter, of relocated services and boost the recovery time, up to 1.8 times faster, to pre-relocation performance level. Our results demonstrate that vMocity is efficient and convenient for relocating VMs across clouds, offering freedom of choice to customers when facing a market of IaaS clouds to align with business objectives (cost, performance, service availability, etc.)