Virtualization is the key technology that has provided the Cloud computing platforms a new way for small and large enterprises to host their applications by renting the available resources. Live VM migration allows a Virtual Machine to be transferred form one host to another while the Virtual Machine is active and running. The main challenge in Live migration over WAN is maintaining the network connectivity during and after the migration. We have carried out live VM migration over the WAN migrating different sizes of VM memory states and presented our solutions based on Open vSwitch/VXLAN and Cisco GRE approaches. VXLAN provides the mobility support needed to maintain the network connectivity between the client and the Virtual machine. We have setup an experimental testbed to calculate the concerned performance metrics and analyzed the performance of live migration in VXLAN and GRE network. Our experimental results present that the network connectivity was maintained throughout the migration process with negligible signaling overhead and minimal downtime. The downtime variation experience with change in the applied network delay was relatively higher when compared to variation experienced when migrating different VM memory states. The total migration time experienced showed a strong relationship with size of the migrating VM memory state. / 0763472814

Live migration is a mechanism that allows a VM to be moved from one host to another while the guest operating system is running. Current live migration implementations are able to maintain network connectivity in a LAN. However, the same techniques cannot be applied for live migration over the Internet. We present a solution based on PMIPv6, a light-weight mobility protocol standardized by IETF. PMIPv6 handles node mobility without requiring any support from the moving nodes. In addition, PMIPv6 works with IPv4, IPv6 and dual-stack nodes. We have setup a testbed to measure the performance of live migration in a PMIPv6 network. Our results show that network connectivity is successfully maintained with little signaling overhead and short VM downtime. As far as we know, this is the first time PMIPv6 is used to enable live migration beyond the scope of a LAN.