Effective Live Cloud Migration

Cloud providers offer their IaaS services based on virtualization to enable multi-tenant and isolated environments for cloud users. Currently, each provider has its own proprietary virtual machine (VM) manager, called the hypervisor. This has resulted in tight coupling of VMs to their underlying hardware hindering live migration of VMs to different providers. A number of user-centric approaches have been proposed from both academia and industry to solve this issue. However, these approaches suffer limitations in terms of performance (migration downtime), flexibility (decoupling VMs from underlying hardware) and security (secure live migration). This paper proposes LivCloud to overcome such limitations. An open-source cloud orchestrator, a developed transport protocol, overlay network and secured migration channel are crucial parts of LivCloud to achieve effective live cloud migration. Moreover, an initial evaluation of LAN live migration in nested virtualization environment and between different hypervisors has been considered to show the migration impact on network throughput, network latency and CPU utilization. The evaluation has demonstrated the need for optimization within the LAN environment.