Using The Dynamic Migration Of Virtual Machine Technology Integration Simulation And Virtual Environments

Nowadays system emulation and virtualization technology have a significant impact on both computer science research and industry.Integrating emulated and virtualized environment is really challenging and important.The purpose of integration is to utilize their advantages and avoid the disadvantage.On the one hand, guest operating system and applications inside the virtual machine(VM) can gain various crucial services after integration.On the other hand,integration of the two environments will provide new simulation and testing schema for new CPU design.System software simulation technique has not only provided relatively mature emulated environment for the guest operating system but also fine-grained instruction monitoring and controlling policy,which brings great convenience to code debugging, analysis and erroneous data taint tracking.Furthermore,system simulation software can be applied to design new instruction set architecture or assist the design of new CPU.However,operating systems(OSes) will gain poor performance in this environment.System virtualization technique utilizes both software and hardware to create several virtualized environments,which are similar to the underlying hardware in system architecture.Compared to the OSes in the native environment with similar hardware configurations,the performance loss of OSes in the virtualized environment is rarely small,about 10%on average.Unluckily,it is really difficult and time-consuming to perform the code debugging in system level and do some data taint tracking.Live migration of virtual machines,a practical and novel technique provided by the system virtualization,can be extended to integrate the two computing environments.This paper proposes Roam,a novel live migration framework which can relocate VMs between virtualized and emulated environment.The core work of Roam is the generic migration protocol construction and the hardware resources' abstraction.In the source side,Roam will intercept the migration commands issued by the virtual machine monitor(VMM) or emulator,then transfer the data to the format defined by Roam and finally choose appropriate migration algorithms to transmit the data to the destination.In the destination side,Roam will transfer the data to the format recognized by the local VMM or emulator after the negotiation. We implemented the prototype of Roam based on Xen VMM and Qemu emulator.The performance measurements show that Roam is a feasible schema which achieves acceptable VM downtime and total migration time.Compared to the original migration system,the overhead of Roam mainly is mainly caused by the State transformation of CPU,memory and I/O devices,which has a total time less than 5ms on average.