Exploring Live Cloud Migration on Amazon EC2

Abstract

Cloud users may decide to live migrate their virtual machines from a public cloud provider to another due to a lower cost or ceasing operations. Currently, it is not possible to install a second virtualization platform on public cloud infrastructure (IaaS) because nested virtualization and hardwareassisted virtualization are disabled by default. As a result, cloud users' VMs are tightly coupled to providers IaaS hindering live migration of VMs to different providers. This paper introduces LivCloud, a solution to live cloud migration. LivCloud is designed based on well-established criteria to live migrate VMs across various cloud IaaS with minimal interruption to the services hosted on these VMs. The paper discusses the basic design of LivCloud which consists of a Virtual Machine manager and IPsec VPN tunnel introduced for the first time within this environment. It is also the first time that the migrated VM architecture (64-bit & 32-bit) is taken into consideration. In this study, we evaluate the implementation of the basic design of LivCloud on Amazon EC2 C4 instance. This instance has a compute optimized instance and has high performance processors. In particular we explore three developed options. Theses options are being tested for the first time on EC2 to change the value of the EC2 instance's control registers. Changing the values of the registers will significantly help enable nested virtualization on Amazon EC2.