COMS: Customer Oriented Migration Service

Virtual machine live migration has been studied for more than a decade, and this technique has been implemented in various commercial hypervisors. However, currently in the cloud environment, virtual machine migration is initiated by system administrators. Cloud customers have no say on this: They can not initiate a migration, and they do not even know whether or not their virtual machines have been migrated. In this paper, we propose the COMS framework, which is short for "Customer Oriented Migration Service". COMS gives more control to cloud customers so that migration becomes a service option and customers are more aware of the migration process. We have implemented a suite of modules in our COMS framework. Our evaluation results show that these modules could either bring performance benefit to cloud customers, or mitigate security threats in the cloud environment.