Heterogeneous Live Migration of Virtual Machines

An indispensable feature enabled by system virtualization is the live migration of virtual machines (VMs). By dynamically relocating an entire execution environment including the operating system from one machine to another, a networked system such as data-center and computing grid can benefit from load balancing, online maintenance and fault tolerance. Ideally, a virtual machine should be able to be migrated across any node with similar machine configuration and granted resources. However, as there are currently a number of VMM vendors, the heterogeneity of the underlying VMMs makes it hard to live migrate a VM originally running on one VMM to run on another VMM. In this paper, we propose Vagrant, a live migration framework which bridges the heterogeneity among diverse VMM abstractions and implementations. Vagrant supports the live migration of VMs across heterogeneous VMMs. We have implemented a prototype, that supports live VM migration between the Xen VMM and KVM. Experimental results indicate that Vagrant achieves acceptable downtime and to-