A taxonomy of Live Virtual Machine (VM) Migration mechanisms in cloud computing environment

The resources in a cloud environment are efficiently governed by employing virtualization technology. Virtualization allows multiple operating system instances to run simultaneously on a single computer. The administration of virtual machines (VMs) in the datacenter of cloud computing environment is a challenging task which requires live migration techniques. Live migration transfers running virtual machines between different physical machines without yielding control over its resources and network connections for maintaining the load balancing. The main aim of VM migration is to minimize the number of physical machines serving the given task/job with least energy consumption by switching off the idle nodes. In this paper, we provide a detailed review of different live migration techniques. The authors also define the taxonomy of live migration mechanisms based on their utilization in specific cloud environments by bringing out their salient features in the respective domains of service.