Kagemusha: A guest-transparent Mobile IPv6 mechanism for wide-area live VM migration

Wide-area live migration of virtual machines (VMs) is a key to advanced cloud federation, allowing dynamic and transparent load balancing among data centers. Although Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) provides strong network infrastructure for mobile nodes, there still exists a missing link to the achievement of MIPv6-based VM migration. Real-world IaaS datacenters require guest-transparent and flexible tunneling mechanisms, which are not provided by existing MIPv6 programs. In this paper, we propose a guest-transparent MIPv6 tunneling mechanism (Kagemusha), that performs Client MIPv6 signaling and tunneling on a host operating system. No MIPv6 program is required to be installed into a guest operating system. The proposed system is fully compatible with existing home agents. It basically works with most virtual machine monitors, including Qemu/KVM and Xen. We have developed the first proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed mechanism. Our experiments showed that our prototype system successfully created MIPv6 tunnels with existing home agents. Its performance overhead was negligible for normal use cases. We also confirmed that the prototype system successfully supported live migration, transparently achieving continuous network reachability for migrated VMs. The downtime of migration increased only by several hundred milliseconds.