Novel Approach to Virtual Machine Migration In Cloud Computing Environment - A Survey

Cloud computing is a powerful technology to perform large scale and complex computing. It abolishes the need to maintain expensive computing hardware, dedicated space, and software. Virtual Machine (VM) is an operating system or application that is installed on the software which has virtual dedicated hardware. Virtual machine migration helps in performing various management operations in data centers. These include load balancing, resource hotspot reduction, server coupling, and hardware/software up gradation. The movement of a virtual machine from one server (source) to another server (destination) is called VM migration. The migration process consumes a certain amount of CPU and network resources. The performance of the migration depends on (i) the migration time--the time between the start of the migration process and the end of the VM at the source, and (ii) the downtime-the time for which the virtual machine is paused. The cost metrics are CPU & network bandwidth utilization. In this paper, the evolution and need of VM Migration in cloud computing environment along with various approaches to select destination host are discussed