A Comprehensive Study on Live Migration of Virtual Machines and Techniques for Migration Optimization
Andrei-Cristian Trăistaru, Radu‐Ioan Ciobanu · 2025
Virtualization is a concept introduced in computer science to achieve resource isolation, cost reduction and even hardware emulation. Despite its early roots in computer science, hardware virtualization remains a hot topic nowadays, given it represents the fundamental principle behind the implementation of distributed systems meant to run workloads in Cloud. Resource virtualization takes place on each component of the Von Neumann computer architecture, leading to a complete abstraction of a physical machine into what is called a Virtual Machine (VM). Thus, multiple VMs can run independently, sharing one physical station, ensuring strong isolation at different software levels and strictly controlled access to available resources at smaller costs due to optimal resource consumption. This encourages a variety of research ideas such as the relocation of a VM withing servers running in a cluster, possibly keeping the workloads under VMs still alive. This paper aims to present a comprehensive description of what VM migration means, what are the challenges of each type of VM migration, and the main existing techniques used for optimizing the process. Furthermore, it dives deep into one of the existing optimization techniques for VM migration with regards to one optimization technique used by Linux operating systems nowadays, called Page Cache / Buffer Cache.