Wide-Area Virtual Machine Migration as Resilience Mechanism

The resilience of services in the Internet has become an important issue and is expected to become even more important in the future. Virtualization is one of the means which can be deployed for resilience purposes. In this paper we follow a systematic approach to the use of virtualization to increase the resilience of network services. First, we provide an analysis of the potential failures of services running within Virtual Machines (VM) and how VM migration or replication can be used to address these failures. Then, we address the problem of re-establishing connectivity between a service and its clients upon successful migration, by leveraging results from mobility research. A special focus is given to wide-area VM migration, since it is considered as the solution for some difficult failures, e.g., large-scale failures due to natural disasters.