Live Gang Migration of Virtual Machines

This paper addresses the problem of simultaneously migrating a group of co-located and live Virtual Machines (VMs), i.e., VMs executing on the same physical machine. The authors refer to such a mass simultaneous migration of active VMs as live gang migration. Cluster administrators may often need to perform live gang migration for load balancing, system maintenance, or power savings. Application performance requirements may dictate that the total migration time, network traffic overhead, and service downtime, be kept minimal when migrating multiple VMs. State-of-the-art live migration techniques optimize the migration of a single VM.