Live Migrating the Virtual Machine Directly Accessing a Physical NIC

Abstract

This paper proposes a dynamic physical-virtual NIC switching. A virtual machine directly accessing the physical NIC can switch to use the virtual NIC if it is to be migrated. This solution is implemented in network configuration level in Guest OS drivers, so it can be used in different VMMs and with different NICs. The experiments illustrate that our solution does not interrupt the network connections from clients' perspective. After the virtual machine switches to use the virtual NIC, it can be migrated and the switching will not affect the migration performance, including the downtime during the migration.