IP mobility to support live migration of virtual machines across subnets

Abstract

User-transparent live migration is one of the most interesting features of Virtual Machine (VM) environments. Current livemigration technologies require that the VM retains its IP network address; therefore, are typically restricted to movement within an IP subnet. The growing number of portable computing devices has led to the development of IP mobility solutions that enable uninterrupted network connectivity while moving between different IP subnets. In this paper we study the application of current network mobility approaches to VM cross-subnet livemigration. We show that although the core problems are similar, there are significant differences between these domains, in terms of both assumptions and requirements. We present a specific solution for live migration of a VM across IP subnets, and introduce a new framework for synchronizing migration and network configuration, which allows better optimization for different scenarios of live migration.