Enhancement of LivCloud for live cloud migration.

Abstract

Virtualization techniques aim at handling the growing demand for computing, storage and communication resources in cloud computing. However, cloud providers often offer their own proprietary virtualization platforms. As a result, cloud users’ VMs are tightly coupled to providers’ IaaS, hindering live migration of VMs to different providers. A number of live cloud migration approaches have been proposed to solve this coupling issue. Our approach, named LivCloud, is among those approaches. It is designed over two stages, basic design stage and the enhancement stage. The implementation of the basic design has been introduced and evaluated on Amazon EC2 and Packet bare metal cloud. This paper discusses the implementation of the second stage, the enhancement of the basic design on Packet. In particular, it illustrates how LivCloud is implemented in two different scenarios. The first scenario deploys KVM bridge networking, OpenvSwitch and C scripts used to meet the network configuration changes during the VMs relocating. This scenario achieves better downtime of one second compared to the basic design of LivCloud. The second scenario uses OpenVPN, OpenDayLight (ODL) and Cisco OpenFlow Manager (OFM) to successfully live migrate VMs back and forth between LivCloud and Packet. This scenario achieves better downtime between 400 and 600 milliseconds. As part of the discussion, the paper proposes a third potential scenario to successfully meet the live cloud migration requirements. This scenario aims to eliminate any downtime occurred in the first two scenarios by utilizing the Open Overlay Router (OOR), Locator Identifier Separator Protocol (LISP) and ODL.