A Complete Theoretical Review on Virtual Machine Migration in Cloud Environment

Abstract

Live migration of virtual machine is a key feature of virtualization. It allows the administrator to move the virtual machine from one physical machine to another physical machine. This technique is widely used for the fault tolerance, load balancing, server maintenance and resource consolidation. Down time and the total migration time are two critical issues in the virtual machine migration, both should be minimized as possible. So the application running on the virtual machine will be suspended for negligible time. Virtual machine migration problem consist of four distinct steps. First step is to select the host from where VM has to be migrated. After selecting the host next step is to select the VM which is migrated. Third step is to select the host where the migrated VM will be placed and the last step is to decide the method which is used to transfer the VM data. In this paper some exiting methodologies and their anomalies are explained for each of the above steps.