Seamless Migration of Virtual Machines across Networks

Abstract

Current technologies that support live migration require that the virtual machine (VM) retain its IP network address. As a consequence, VM migration is oftentimes restricted to movement within an IP subnet or entails interrupted network connectivity to allow the VM to migrate. Thus, migrating VMs beyond subnets becomes a significant challenge for the purposes of load balancing, moving computation close to data sources, or connectivity recovery during natural disasters. Conventional approaches use tunneling, routing, and layer-2 expansion methods to extend the network to geographically disparate locations, thereby transforming the problem of migration between subnets to migration within a subnet. These approaches, however, increase complexity and involve considerable human involvement. The contribution of our paper is to address the aforementioned shortcomings by enabling VM migration across subnets and doing so with uninterrupted network connectivity. We make the case that decoupling IP addresses from the notion of transport endpoints is the key to solving a host of problems, including seamless VM migration and mobility. We demonstrate that VMs can be migrated seamlessly between different subnets - without losing network state - by presenting a backward-compatible prototype implementation and a case study.