CloudNet: Dynamic Pooling of Cloud Resources by Live WAN Migration of Virtual Machines

Virtualization technology and the ease with which virtual machines (VMs) can be migrated within the LAN have changed the scope of resource management from allocating resources on a single server to manipulating pools of resources within a data center. We expect WAN migration of virtual machines to likewise transform the scope of provisioning resources from a single data center to multiple data centers spread across the country or around the world. In this paper, we present the CloudNet architecture consisting of cloud computing platforms linked with a virtual private network (VPN)-based network infrastructure to provide seamless and secure connectivity between enterprise and cloud data center sites. To realize our vision of efficiently pooling geographically distributed data center resources, CloudNet provides optimized support for live WAN migration of virtual machines. Specifically, we present a set of optimizations that minimize the cost of transferring storage and virtual machine memory during migrations over low bandwidth and high-latency Internet links. We evaluate our system on an operational cloud platform distributed across the continental US. During simultaneous migrations of four VMs between data centers in Texas and Illinois, CloudNet's optimizations reduce memory migration time by 65% and lower bandwidth consumption for the storage and memory transfer by 19 GB, a 50% reduction.