Performance Metrics of Virtual Machine Live Migration

Abstract

Live virtual machine migration allows resources from one physical server to be moved to another with little or no interruption in the processes of the guest operating system. The process involved in performing a live migration includes copying the guest virtual machine memory state and cpu register state from a hyper visor on one server to another. In this paper, virtual machine migration is evaluated in terms of performance of the virtual machine while being migrated, performance of the cloud architecture while migrating the virtual machine, and the power costs of performing a live virtual machine migration. The experiments on virtual machine live migration will give insight on how the cloud architecture responds and handles live migrations, and how virtual machines perform while they are in a migration phase.