Optimization, and Future Prospects of Live Virtual Machine Migration in Cloud Computing: A Comprehensive Survey on Techniques, Challenges, and Emerging Directions
Mandeep Singh, Rajiv Kumar, Gurpreet Singh Panesar, Sanjay Taneja · 2025
Live virtual machine (VM) migration is a transformative technology in cloud computing, enabling dynamic resource management with minimal service disruption. It plays a critical role in optimizing load balancing, energy efficiency, fault tolerance, and online maintenance within virtualized environments. Despite its advantages, live VM migration presents significant challenges, including high network overhead, downtime, and power consumption. In this paper provides a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art optimization techniques for live VM migration, focusing on pre-copy, post-copy, and hybrid approaches. We examine techniques such as memory compression, data deduplication, and checkpointing, highlighting their contributions in minimizing downtime, migration time, and data transfer overhead. Additionally, we explore emerging methods in dirty page prediction, WAN optimization, and energy-aware migration. In this paper also identifies open research challenges, such as improving memory migration efficiency, enabling secure migrations over wide-area networks (WANs), and reducing the energy footprint of the migration process. Furthermore, we discuss the security vulnerabilities associated with VM migration and propose solutions to safeguard sensitive data and maintain integrity during transit. By synthesizing existing techniques and proposing future research directions, this survey aims to provide a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to enhance the efficiency, reliability, and security of live VM migration. The insights presented herein are expected to drive innovations that address the current limitations of VM migration and pave the way for its broader adoption in next-generation cloud infrastructures.