A Strategy for Live Migration of Virtual Machines in a Cloud Federation

Migration of virtual machines (VMs) from one data center to another is essential to deal with scenarios such as load balancing, maintenance, power management, VM failures, etc. Application of VM migration is not only limited to a single cloud service provider, but also to inter-cloud architectures such as cloud federation. Migration in a federation is a complex operation as it encompasses many autonomous service providers with different standards, rules, and protocols. Migration can be carried out in two ways, first, live and, second, non-live. In case of live migration, a VM continues to execute at the source in contrast to non-live where its execution is suspended. In this paper, a framework for secure live migration of VMs in a cloud federation is proposed. Costs associated with it is analyzed for serial, parallel, and improved serial strategies. The proposed framework is simulated using a CloudSim simulator. Metrics considered for evaluation are communication overhead, migration time, and downtime. Further, power consumption for all strategies is calculated and compared. It is observed that downtime is least for parallel, whereas migration time is least for improved serial. The power consumption is highest for parallel and least for improved serial.