Cuckoo Migration: Self Migration on JointCloud Using New Hardware Features

Abstract—With the growing number of cloud providers and the increasing market of cloud computing, it’s more and more necessary to realize the cooperation and aggregation of clouds. JointCloud is a framework aiming at facilitating the consociation of various clouds on the market. And the JointCloud Collaboration Environment (JCCE) is the ideal environment for global cloud providers. To realize the clouds cooperation, migration is one of the most important issues that have to be considered. Live migration has always been one of the major primitive operations of virtualization and has been discussed for long. Traditional works deal the migration mainly by using a host-driven migration method, the majority work of which is dominated by the hypervisor. However, as the age of cloud aggregation comes, traditional methods show their defects. In cloud aggregation environment, cloud providers may refuse to supply the migration service to grasp their customers, or the hypervisors are heterogeneous on the two sides of migration. Those problems raise challenges to traditional host-driven methods. In this paper, we propose Cuckoo Migration, a new self- migration method using Intel new hardware feature. We leverage a special processor function, VMFUNC, to create a two-EPT architecture for the guest VM, so that the guest has a mirror memory space, which can be used as the duplication of memory. This paper mainly introduces how we build a two-EPT architecture for the guest and discusses how we leverage such architecture to do our self-migration.