HyperMIP: Hypervisor Controlled Mobile IP for Virtual Machine Live Migration across Networks

Abstract

Live migration provides transparent load-balancing and fault-tolerant mechanism for applications. When a Virtual Machine migrates among hosts residing in two networks, the network attachment point of the Virtual Machine is also changed, thus the Virtual Machine will suffer from IP mobility problem after migration. This paper proposes an approach called Hypervisor controlled Mobile IP to support live migration of Virtual Machine across networks, which enables virtual machine live migration over distributed computing resources. Since Hypervisor is capable of predicting exact time and destination host of Virtual Machine migration, our approach not only can improve migration performance but also reduce the network restoration latency. Some comprehensive experiments have been conducted and the results show that the HyperMIP brings negligible overhead to network performance of Virtual Machines. The network restoration time of HyperMIP supported migration is about only 3 second. HyperMIP is a promising essential component to provide reliability and fault tolerant for network application running in Virtual Machine.