Live migration of virtual machines

Migrating operating system instances across distinct physical hosts is a useful tool for administrators of data centers and clusters: It allows a clean separation between hardware and software, and facilitates fault management, load balancing, and low-level system maintenance. By carrying out the majority of migration while OSes continue to run, we achieve impressive performance with minimal service downtimes; we demonstrate the migration of entire OS instances on a commodity cluster, recording service downtimes as low as 60ms. We show that that our performance is sufficient to make live migration a practical tool even for servers running interactive loads. In this paper we consider the design options for…