CompSC: live migration with pass-through devices

Live migration is one of the most important features of virtualization technology. With regard to recent virtualization techniques, performance of network I/O is critical. Current network I/O virtualization (e.g. Para-virtualized I/O, VMDq) has a significant performance gap with native network I/O. Pass-through network devices have near native performance, however, they have thus far prevented live migration. No existing methods solve the problem of live migration with pass-through devices perfectly. In this paper, we propose CompSC: a solution of hardware state migration that will enable the live migration support of passthrough devices. We go on to apply CompSC to SR-IOV network interface controllers. We discuss the attributes of different hardware states in pass-through devices and migrate them with corresponding techniques. Our experiments show that CompSC enables live migration on an Intel 82599 VF with a throughput 282.66% higher than para-virtualized devices. In addition, serv...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: VEE
• Authors: Zhenhao Pan, Yaozu Dong, Yu Chen, Lei Zhang, Zhijiao Zhang
• Keywords: Network Interface Controllers, Service Downtime, State Migration, VEE 2012, Virtualization