XenFlow: Seamless migration primitive and quality of service for virtual networks

Abstract

Next generation networks offer virtual networks on demand, each one with its own features and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Besides, live-migration provides a flexible and seamless topology remapping primitive for virtual networks, but it is usually limited to a local area network. In this paper, we propose XenFlow, a hybrid virtualization system, based on Xen and OpenFlow. XenFlow main goals are threefold. First, it provides a flexible virtual network migration primitive, as it deploys a Software Defined Networking between virtual machines, based on OpenFlow. Second, it provides a strong isolation of virtual networks, avoiding denial of service caused by interference of other virtual networks. Third, XenFlow offers inter-network and intra-network QoS provisioning by a consistent resource controller. We developed a prototype and our results show that the proposed system performs better than native mechanism of Xen virtual machine migration. XenFlow allows virtual router migration between different local area networks without creating tunnels or losing packets. Our experiments also show that resource usage controller meets QoS requirements and outperforms other techniques while it redistributes idle network resources.