20.
09.
2013
t.b.d.
Nicholas McGuire
20.
09.
2013
Live Migration of Virtual Machines between Heterogeneous Host Systems
Jacek Galowicz
RWTH Aachen
The NOVA microhypervisor and its companion user-level virtual-machine
monitor facilitate the construction of systems with minimal
application-specific trusted computing bases. On NOVA, virtual machines
provide a way for reusing existing legacy software and for decoupling
guest operating systems from the underlying platform hardware. Live
migration is a technique to transfer a virtual machine from one host
system to another with minimal disruption to the execution of the VM. The
goal of this thesis is to explore how the existing live migration feature
of the VMM can be extended, such that virtual machines can be moved
between heterogeneous host systems with different CPU capabilities and
different host devices.
Using network devices as an example, a
mechanism is designed to migrate virtual machines equipped with fast
pass-through network interfaces, utilizing native ACPI hot plugging
mechanisms. To preserve standing guest TCP connections over migrations,
the network interface model is extended to make the host propagate the
physical movement of the guest within the network to other network
participants. Guest system source code is left untouched. It is shown how
to configure guest systems to enable them for dealing with
disappearing/reappearing network interfaces while servicing network
requests during the migration of themselves. The presented solution is
device type agnostic and can also deal with devices which differ from
host to host. The prototype implementation is evaluated, future
possibilities are outlined and possible performance optimizations are
described.
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