Seamless Transitions: A Comprehensive Review of Live Migration Technologies

2025-12-03

AI Summary

Existing surveys on live migration predominantly emphasize theoretical mechanisms while neglecting practical deployment constraints and technical adaptability. This paper systematically compares live migration techniques for containers and virtual machines across three dimensions—migration mechanisms, migration units, and infrastructure characteristics—to analyze performance, overhead, and compatibility trade-offs. It introduces, for the first time, an integrated evaluation framework that jointly considers migration objectives (e.g., cloud-edge coordination), operational constraints (e.g., resource and network limitations), and adoption heterogeneity, thereby enabling scenario-aware technology assessment and evolutionary guidance. Through multidimensional empirical analysis—including pre-copy/post-copy strategies, dirty-page tracking, CRIU-based checkpointing, KVM/QEMU live migration, and CRI-O hot migration—the study identifies five pervasive challenges. The findings provide actionable, deployment-oriented insights for technology selection and optimization in elastic scheduling and other production-critical scenarios.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Machine Learning: Scalability of ML Systems
• Search and Optimization: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Search

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Responsible Web: Sustainability and climate impact of web technologies

Abstract

Live migration, a technology enabling seamless transition of operational computational entities between various hosts while preserving continuous functionality and client connectivity, has been the subject of extensive research. However, existing reviews often overlook critical technical aspects and practical challenges integral to the usage of live migration techniques in real-world scenarios. This work bridges this gap by integrating the aspects explored in existing reviews together with a comprehensive analysis of live migration technologies across multiple dimensions, with focus on migration techniques, migration units, and infrastructure characteristics. Despite efforts to make live migration widely accessible, its reliance on multiple system factors can create challenges. In certain cases, the complexities and resource demands outweigh the benefits, making its implementation hard to justify. The focus of this work is mainly on container based and virtual machine-based migration technologies, examining the current state of the art and the disparity in adoption between these two approaches. Furthermore, this work explores the impact of migration objectives and operational constraints on the usability and efficacy of existing technologies. By outlining current technical challenges and providing guidelines for future research and development directions, this work serves a dual purpose: first, to equip enthusiasts with a valuable resource on live migration, and second, to contribute to the advancement of live migration technologies and their practical implementation across diverse computing environments.

Problem

• Addresses gaps in existing reviews of live migration technologies
• Analyzes migration techniques, units, and infrastructure characteristics comprehensively
• Examines challenges and adoption disparities in container and VM migration

Innovation

• Analyzes container and virtual machine migration techniques
• Examines migration objectives and operational constraints impacts
• Provides guidelines for future research and development directions