Evaluation of a Secure Live Migration of Virtual Machines Using Ipsec Implementation

Abstract

Live migration enables administrators to perform online maintenance on host and virtual machines without interrupted service during fault occurrences. While migrating VMs between physical servers of different data centers over the network is considered, security is essential for securing the migration data which has not been considered in most cases up until now. This paper considers performing live migration under an IPsec implemented transmission channel to achieve a secured transmission of migration data between servers. IPsec is proven to be secure and can be implemented for live migration but due to the excessive amount of overhead produced by IPsec, proposed sophisticated tuning of MTU and MSS values resulted in a better migration performance.