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One of the most useful features provided by virtual machine (VM) technologies is the ability to migrate running OS instances across distinct physical nodes. As a basis for many administration tools in modern clusters and data-centers, VM migration is desired to be extremely efficient to reduce both migration time and performance impact on hosted applications. Currently, most VM environments use the Socket interface and the TCP/IP protocol to transfer VM migration traffic. In this paper, we propose a high performance VM migration design by using RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). RDMA is a feature provided by many modern high speed interconnects that are currently being widely deployed in data-centers and clusters. By taking advantage of the low software overhead and the one-sided nature of RDMA, our design significantly improves the efficiency of VM migration. We also contribute a set of micro-benchmarks and application-level benchmark evaluations aimed at evaluating important metrics of VM migration. The evaluations using our prototype implementation over Xen and InfiniBand show that RDMA can drastically reduce the migration overhead: up to 80% on total migration time and up to 77% on application observed downtime.
Huang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.