EXAMINING THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF VIRTUAL MACHINE MIGRATION SYSTEMS IN CLOUD-BASED ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

Virtualization techniques are successfully used in large-scale Cloud Data Centers (CDC) to address the increasing demand for compute, storage, and communication resources. Many resource management objectives, such as load balancing, online system maintenance, proactive fault tolerance, power management, and resource sharing, can be achieved by virtual machine (VM) migration. Since virtual machines require constant access to CPU cycles, cache memory, memory space, and communication bandwidth, the process of migrating virtual machines is resource-intensive. We discuss many performance metrics, including data movement volume, total migration time, and downtime of application services. The transfer of CPU, memory, and storage data is a part of virtual machine migration, and we outline the specific kinds of data that need to be moved in each scenario. We offer a brief overview of security vulnerabilities associated with live virtual machine migration, classifying them into three categories (control plane, migration module, and data plane). We also discuss the requirements for security and the available countermeasures against possible attacks. Particular gaps are identified and research issues related to improving the performance of live virtual machine migration are tackled.