Transpacific Live Migration with Wide Area Distributed Storage

Abstract

In recent years, much attention has been paid to wide area distributed storages to backup data remotely and ensure that business processes can continue in terms of disaster recovery. In the 'distcloud' project, authors have been involved in the research of wide area distributed storage by clustering many computer resources located in geographically distributed areas, where the number of sites is more than 2 (N > 2). The storage supports a shared single POSIX file system so that LDLM (Long Distance Live Migration) of VMs (Virtual Machines) works well between multiple sites. We introduce the concept and basic architecture of the wide area distributed storage and its technical improvement for LDLM. We describe the result of our experiment, that is, 1) Nation Wide Live Migration (about 500 Km) in Japan, and 2) Transpacific Live Migration (over 24,000 Km). We show the technical benefit of the current implementation and discuss suitable applications and remaining issues for further research topics.