Investigating the Impact of Live Migration on the Network Infrastructure in Enterprise Environments

Live migration of virtual machines (VMs) enables the transfer of a running VM to a new hardware component with minimal and hardly noticeable interruption. It is an important feature of virtualization technology for maintenance, load-balancing and energy reduction, especially for data centers operators and cluster service providers. Recently, virtualization started to find its way into enterprise environments such as large and medium-sized IT companies. However, no feasibility study to highlight the pros and cons of such a trend has been conducted yet. In particular, a seamless live migration requires a reliable network connection and will have an impact on the network infrastructure. Therefore, this paper describes the design and set-up of our test bed to simulate a realistic implementation of virtualization in an enterprise environment. We tested three different scenarios of live migration and checked the impact of each scenario on the network infrastructure. Based on the implementation results, the paper introduces a list of recommendations for IT companies which might be interested in implementing virtualization and live migration.