Live migration on ARM-based micro-datacentres

Abstract

Live migration, underpinned by virtualisation technologies, has enabled improved manageability and fault tolerance for servers. However, virtualised server infrastructures suffer from significant processing overheads, system inconsistencies, security issues and unpredictable performance which makes them unsuitable for low-power and resource-constraint computing devices that processing latency-sensitive, "Big-data"-type data. Consequently, we ask: "How do we eliminate the overhead of virtualisation whilst still retaining its benefits?" Motivated by this question, we investigate a practical approach for a bare-metal live migration scheme for ARM-based instances low-power servers and edge devices. In this paper, we position ARM-based bare-metal live migration as a technique that will underpin the efficiency on edge-computing and on Microdatacentres. We also introduce our early work on identifying three key technical challenges and discuss their solutions.

A Survey on Mobility-Induced Service Migration in the Fog, Edge, and Related Computing Paradigms

“…A different idea is presented in [5], where authors advocate the vision for "baremetal edge computing". Following this approach, system administrators can perform a lightweight, ARM-based, "bare-metal live migration".…”