Improving the live migration process of large enterprise applications

Recent developments in virtualisation technology have resulted in its proliferation of usage across datacentres. Ultimately, the goal of this technology is to more efficiently utilise server resources to reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by abstracting hardware and consolidating servers. This results in lower equipment costs and less electrical consumption for server power and cooling. However, the TCO benefits of holistic virtualisation extend beyond server assets. One of these aspects relates to the ability of being able to migrate Virtual Machines (VM) across distinct physical hosts over a network. However, limitations of the current migration technology start to appear when they are applied on larger application systems such as SAP ERP or SAP ByDesign. Such systems consume a large amount of memory and cannot be transferred as seamlessly as smaller ones, creating service interruption. Limiting the impact and optimising migration becomes even more important with the generalisation of Service Level Agreement (SLA). In this document we present our design and evaluation of a system that enables live migration of VMs running large enterprise applications without severely disrupting their live services, even across the Internet. By combining well-known techniques and innovative ones we can reduce system down-time and resource impact for migrating live, large Virtual Execution Environments.