Seamless live migration of virtual machines over the MAN/WAN

The “VM Turntable” demonstrator at iGRID 2005 pioneered the integration of Virtual Machines (VMs) with deterministic “lightpath” network services across a MAN/WAN. The results provide for a new stage of virtualization—one for which computation is no longer localized within a data center but rather can be migrated across geographical distances, with negligible downtime, transparently to running applications and external clients. A noteworthy data point indicates that a live VM was migrated between Amsterdam, NL and San Diego, USA with just 1–2 s of application downtime. When compared to intra-LAN local migrations, downtime is only about 5–10 times greater despite 1000 times higher round-trip times.