Security in Virtual Machine Live Migration for KVM

Virtualization is a technical innovation designed to increase the level of system abstraction and enable IT users to harness ever-increasing levels of computer performance. The most fundamental part of virtualization is the hypervisor. To perform maintenance on a host server, we need to be able to move all of its VMs onto other host servers with minimum disruption to end users. Even more importantly, if our virtual workloads peak and need more resources, our virtual infrastructure should be able to automatically locate a host server with adequate resources and move the VMs to this host. And the entire process should be completely transparent to end users. VM migration, especially live migration is a desirable feature in Grid and Cloud Computing systems for load balancing, elastic scaling, fault tolerance, and hardware maintenance. The security and reliability issues that reside in VM live migration is a critical factor for its acceptance by IT industry. Though the performance is optimized through live migration, there are two important issues to be noted, reliability and security. In this paper, we propose how to migrate a VM Guest to another VM Host Server. We discuss the steps regarding the KVM live migration requirements and the security and reliability issues in live migration.