A “network-paging” based method for wide-area live-migration of VMs

In cloud-computing environments, migration of virtual machines (VMs) between data centers can solve many problems such as load balancing and power saving. One of the difficulties in wide-area migration, however, is the “address-warping” problem, in which the address of the VM warps from the source server to the destination server. This confuses or complicates the status of the WAN, and the LANs connected to the WAN. We propose two solutions to this problem. One is to switch an address-translation rule, and the other is to switch multiple virtual networks. The former is analogous to paging in memory virtualization, and the latter is analogous to segmentation. The “network-paging” based method is described and our evaluation results are shown. It took less than 100 ms in average to switch from the source to the destination server using this method.