A Survey on Virtual Machine Migration: Challenges, Techniques, and Open Issues

When users flood in cloud data centers, how to efficiently manage hardware resources and virtual machines (VMs) in a data center to both lower economical cost and ensure a high service quality becomes an inevitable work for cloud providers. VM migration is a cornerstone technology for the majority of cloud management tasks. It frees a VM from the underlying hardware. This feature brings a plenty of benefits to cloud providers and users. Many researchers are focusing on pushing its cutting edge. In this paper, we first give an overview of VM migration and discuss both its benefits and challenges. VM migration schemes are classified from three perspectives: 1) manner; 2) distance; and 3) granularity. The studies on non-live migration are simply reviewed, and then those on live migration are comprehensively surveyed based on the three main challenges it faces: 1) memory data migration; 2) storage data migration; and 3) network connection continuity. The works on quantitative analysis of VM migration performance are also elaborated. With the development and evolution of cloud computing, user mobility becomes an important motivation for live VM migration in some scenarios (e.g., fog computing). Thus, the studies regarding linking VM migration to user mobility are summarized as well. At last, we list the open issues which are waiting for solutions or further optimizations on live VM migration.