Zero-Loss Virtual Machine Migration with IPv6 Segment Routing

Yoann Desmouceaux (1) , Mark Townsley , Thomas Heide Clausen (1)

1 X - École polytechnique

With the development of large-scale data centers, Virtual Machine (VM) migration is a key component for resource optimization, cost reduction, and maintenance. From a network perspective, traditional VM migration mechanisms rely on the hypervisor running at the destination host advertising the new location of the VM once migration is complete. However, this creates a period of time during which the VM is not reachable, yielding packet loss. This paper introduces a method to perform zero-loss VM migration by using IPv6 Segment Routing (SR). Rather than letting the hypervisor update a locator mapping after VM migration is complete, a logical path consisting of the source and destination hosts is pre-provisioned. Packets destined to the migrating VM are sent through this path using SR, shortly before, during, and shortly after migration-the virtual router on the source host being in charge of forwarding packets locally if the VM migration has not completed yet, or to the destination host otherwise. The proposed mechanism is implemented as a VPP plugin, and feasibility of zero-loss VM migration is demonstrated with various workloads. Evaluation shows that this yields benefits in terms of session opening latency and TCP throughput.

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Yoann Desmouceaux, Mark Townsley, Thomas Heide Clausen. Zero-Loss Virtual Machine Migration with IPv6 Segment Routing. 2018 14th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM), Nov 2018, Rome, Italy. ⟨hal-02263378⟩