Live migration of virtual machines based on hybrid memory copy approach

The live migration technology of virtual machine, fully leveraging virtualization's flexibility and encapsulation abilities, is very helpful for dynamic workload balancing and flexible application deployment in the large-scale virtual machine environments. However, the existing live migration mechanisms have to be in the face of some problem, such as convergence of iteration, redundance of copying, and guest OS transparence. This paper discusses the application of combining memory pushing copy with on-demand copy approaches, and proposes a live migration mechanism based on hybrid memory copy approach, named HybMEC, in order to accelerate VM state migration. Base on KVM virtual machine monitor, we have implemented the HybMEC prototype system. The evaluation results under various VM workloads show that HybMEC is able to efficiently support VM live migration with lower resource consumption and latency, and to achieve significant improvements over existing mechanisms by the total migration time and the volume of data synchronized over the network.