A framework for migrating production snapshots of composite applications to virtualized environments

Abstract

Migrating production applications from physical datacenters to a virtualized environment is becoming essential to reduce operational costs. In order to avoid direct access to production systems, migration from disk snapshots is preferable. Model based migration approaches are not suitable for this purpose since they need to perform configuration discovery on production systems. Recent approaches that rely upon an isolated network require special setup and are limited to handling network configurations only. In this paper we present a framework for instantiating an application from disk snapshots in a virtualized environment. Our approach comprises of formally specifying the knowledge about product configurations and compiling the knowledge into a plan. The plan is capable of discovering application configurations in an inconsistent configuration setup. A key feature of our framework is that knowledge is specified once per product and re-used across applications that use the product. We have implemented a prototype of our approach and evaluated it on a real world application. The evaluation demonstrates the feasibility of our approach for migration using disk snapshots.