Virtual Machine Migration

This chapter presents the major virtual machine (VM) migration techniques. First, it highlights the benefits, costs and challenges for the realization of the live migration of VMs. The chapter also highlights I/O virtualization techniques and discusses how to migrate VM even if they directly access Input/Output (I/O) devices or use I/O virtualization techniques. Then, it examines various schemes of VM migration and discusses research directions in virtualization security. The ultimate goal is to provide a deep understanding of the developments and the future directions regarding virtualized environments migration primitive. Virtual network migration is explained, and the chapter also presents a proposal for migrating virtual routers without packet losses. It describes the main security issues of machine virtualization, and exposes the main security requirements for a secure virtualization platform. Finally, it focuses on securing VM migration and also highlights security issues that affect cloud computing environment based on machine virtualization.