Optimizing transport technology choices for Virtual Machines (VMs)in data-center and cloud environments

Virtual Machines (VMs) form the central processing entity in data-centers and are key to facilitating cloud computing environments. To make cloud computing a reality in service provider domains, applicability of VMs to metropolitan networks is important. The technology in the metro domain is progressively moving from circuit switched SONET/SDH to packet based Carrier Ethernet. An interesting question that we seek to answer is how does Carrier Ethernet perform for VM migration in data-center and cloud environments. To this end, we perform an extensive simulation study measuring performance of VM migration over both flavors of Carrier Ethernet - namely PBB-TE and MPLS-TP. Our study concludes in the feasibility of Carrier Ethernet as a transport technology in data-centers and clouds.