Virtualized Datacenters on Clouds

Inter-Datacenter Migration Mechanism

We study the “tracking the moon/sun” computing paradigm where VM locations are optimized around the world for better energy saving; e.g., the system automatically moves virtualized datacenters to locations with excess electricity. We are developing wide-area VM migration technologies that can efficiently transfer whole VM states to remote datacenters. This project also explores disaster recovery and mitigation techniques that can transparently evacuate IT infrastructure to safe locations in case of a severe earthquake.

It is necessary to reduce migration data more drastically for relocating a bunch of VMs among datacenters.

Proactive Disk Block Caching over Wide-area Network - xNBD-WAN

We are extending our hypervisor-independent live storage migration mechanism to support wide-area networks more efficiently. We propose a mechanism to improve live storage migration across WAN. The key idea is to reduce the amount of data to be transferred
by proactively caching virtual disk blocks to a backup site during regular VM operation. As a result of pre-cached disk blocks, the proposed mechanism can dramatically reduce the amount of data and consequently the time required to live migrate the entire VM state.

Reproducing Memory Page Contents without Transferring

This is joint work with University of Tokyo. It's ongoing. See the publication list for the latest update.


Taming concurrent Live Migrations over Wide-area Networks

This is joint work with ACIS Lab of University of Florida. It's ongoing. See the publication list for the latest update.


Transparent IP Packet Forwarding with Mobile IPv6 Infrastructure

Kagemusha is a transparent Client Mobile IPv6 Tunneling mechanism that allows light-weight overlay networks among geographically-distributed cloud systems. No MIPv6 program needs be installed into a guest operating system. Kagemusha is fully compatible with existing home agents (HAs) in the MIPv6 infrastructure. See the dedicated project page.


Selected Publications

  • A WAN-optimized Live Storage Migration Mechanism Toward Virtual Machine Evacuation Upon Severe Disasters,
    Takahiro Hirofuchi, Maurício Tsugawa, Hidemoto Nakada, Tomohiro Kudoh, Satoshi Itoh,
    IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, pp.2663-2674, Vol.E96-D, No.12, IEICE, Dec 2013
    DOI: 10.1587/transinf.E96.D.2663
    PDF (Full Text)


Disaster Mitigation and Recovery

This project studies the effectiveness of movable virtualized datacenters in keeping IT services alive during and after a disaster by investigating the joint usage of VM migration (live or using checkpoints), virtual networking, and shared/replicated storage for VM images.

See our talk slides illustrating how and why wide-area live migration is promising for disaster recovery and what we have done so far.

Publications

  • IT Virtualization for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery,
    Maurício Tsugawa, Renato Figueiredo, José Fortes, Takahiro Hirofuchi, Hidemoto Nakada, Ryousei Takano,
    J-RAPID Symposium, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Mar 2013 
    slides url
  • On the Use of Virtualization Technologies to Support Uninterrupted IT Services ,
    Maurício Tsugawa, Renato Figueiredo, José Fortes, Takahiro Hirofuchi, Hidemoto Nakada, Ryousei Takano,
    IEEE ICC2012 Workshop on Re-think ICT infrastructure designs and operations, pp. 7892--7896, IEEE, Jun 2012




Multi-site Virtual Cluster

A multi-site virtual cluster is a novel concept for distributed resource collabolation among datacenters. It allows flexible and scalable resource management far beyond limitations at a single site. It is an enabling technology of Cloud Federation among distributed datacenters and organizations.




Publications

  • A Multi-Site Virtual Cluster System for Wide Area Networks,
    Takahiro Hirofuchi, Takeshi Yokoi, Tadashi Ebara, Yusuke Tanimura, Hirotaka Ogawa, Hidemoto Nakada, Yoshio Tanaka, and Satoshi Sekiguchi,
    Proceedings of the First USENIX Workshop in Large-Scale Computing, USENIX Association, Jun 2008

  • Multi-Site Virtual Cluster: A User-Oriented, Distributed Deployment and Management Mechanism for Grid Computing Environments,
    Takahiro Hirofuchi, Takeshi Yokoi, Tadashi Ebara, Yusuke Tanimura, Hirotaka Ogawa, Hidemoto Nakada,
    Middleware Technologies for Enabling Next-generation Network Services and Applications (Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE/IFIP International Workshop on End-to-end Virtualization and Grid Management), pp. 203--216, multicon verlag, Sep 2008